
JKMAN MACLEO 

BY sTJhtT JOHN 

WELLWOOD 





FAMOUS 
•SCOTS' 
•SERIES' 




NORMAN 
MACLEOD 



FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 



The following Volumes are now ready— 

THOMAS CARLYLE. By Hector C. Macpherson 

ALLAN RAMSAY. By Oliphant Smeaton 

HUGH MILLER. By W. Keith Leask 

JOHN KNOX. By A. Taylor Innes 

ROBERT BURNS. By Gabriel Setoun 

THE BALLAD I STS. By John Geddie 

RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor Herkless 

SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By Eve Blantyre Simpson 

THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. Garden Blaikie 

JAMES BOSWELL. By W. Keith Leask 

TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By Oliphant Smeaton 

FLETCHER OF SALTOUN. By G. W. T. Omond 

THE BLACKWOOD GROUP. By Sir George Douglas 

NORMAN MACLEOD. By John Wellwood 



NORMAN 
MACLEOD 

BY 

john : : 
wellwood o 



"FAMOUS 

scots: 




series: 



PUBLISHED B 
CHARLES '^LSS 
SCRIBNER'S SONS 
K&TT NEW YORK 

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3305 



NOTE 



My cordial gratitude is due to Mr. William Isbister 
— 'best of smokers 7 — for allowing me (and that with 
so good a spirit) to quote from the Memoir of Norman 
Madeod. The present piece will not have been written 
in vain, as the saying is, if it sends readers to that 
entertaining quarry. 

I have also to thank Mr. J. C. Erskine, Hope Street, 
Glasgow ('Be calm, Erskine'), for furnishing me with 
certain letters never before published, specimens of 
which will be found in the text. 

The extracts from the Queen's books are made with 
Her Majesty's gracious permission. 

J. W. 

Manse of Drainie, April 1897. 



5 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Introduction 9 

CHAPTER I 

Descent— Boyhood— Student Years . . . .11 
CHAPTER II 

Minister of Loudoun — Non-intrusion Controversy . 28 

CHAPTER III 

After the Battle — Minister of Dalkeith— Embassies 
— Evangelical Alliance — Death of John Macintosh 47 

CHAPTER IV 

The Barony Parish— Macleod as Pastor — As Preacher 
—His Sympathy— Position in Glasgow . . .65 



CHAPTER V 



Editor and Author . 

7 



85 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

CHAPTER VI 

Balmoral 102 

CHAPTER VII 
Travels—Broad Church Movements . . . .108 

CHAPTER VIII 
India — The Apex — The End 125 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



INTRODUCTION 

If any modern minister has a place, though it were the 
least, among the worthies of his nation, he must have 
been a surprising personality. When Scottish life was 
based on Calvinism, and there was a Stuart deforming 
the Kirk at the sword's point, a preacher might rise to 
be a leader of the people, if not a virtual ruler in the 
kingdom. From Knox to Carstairs the line of famous 
Scots (such as they are) is black with Geneva gowns. 
But for two hundred years the Protestant spirit has gone 
all to democracy and the march of intellect, while the 
clergy have stood by the vacant symbol, exiled — 

'From the dragon- warder'd fountains 

Where the springs of knowledge are, 
From the watchers on the mountains 
And the bright and morning star.' 

So the Church has come down in the world. Her 
affairs are her own, and subject to journalistic irony; 
with few exceptions her leaders, for all the noise they 

9 



IO 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



may make in their day and generation, have only to die 
to be forgotten. One calls to mind certain men who 
were not in holy orders, mere sages or poets, and knows 
them for the real teachers of their times. In Norman 
Macleod the hero as priest reappears, but at some cost 
to the clerical tradition. Making little of dogma, and 
less of rites, he went deep down into the common heart 
for his ground of appeal, and on his lips love, divine and 
human, was a tale to move the philosopher and win the 
crowd. His work in the world was to make men good 
after the pattern of Jesus, and to that work he brought 
a burning belief, a boundless sympathy, and rare 
oratorical and literary gifts. One in the throng at the 
uneral of this great minister was heard to say, 6 There 
goes Norman Macleod. If he had done no more than 
what he did for my soul, he would shine as the stars for 
ever/ And the like might have been confessed by 
thousands; nay, many who never heard his voice nor 
saw his face were better for the rumour of such a man. 
His name went from the Church to the nation, and 
over all English-speaking lands ; and with that of 
Chalmers has endured. 



CHAPTER I 



1812-1837 

DESCENT — BOYHOOD — STUDENT YEARS 

Nothing astonished Dr. Johnson so much, when he was 
roving in the Hebrides, as to find men who lived in 
huts and quoted Latin. These were the 'gentlemen 
tacksmen/ and no more remarkable tenantry was ever 
seen on any soil. What they did for agriculture I 
cannot say; as much, perhaps, as their destroyers, who 
made a solitude and called it sheep : but they had 
bread to eat and raiment to put on (though they 
might sometimes sleep with their feet in the mire), and 
their praise is that they sent forth a splendid race to the 
fields of honour. Their sons, scant of cash, yet with the 
air of nobles, thronged the colleges, nor was there any 
career in which laurels were not won by men from the 
mountains and the isles. Picture some judge or general 
gazing at the ruins of a shieling, and then sneer at the 
old Highland tacksmen. From this class Norman 
Macleod was descended. His great-grandfather, the 
earliest ancestor of whom we have any record, lived in 



12 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Skye, at Swordale, near Dun vegan Castle, about the 
middle of last century. The tradition is that he was a 
good man and the first in his neighbourhood to 
introduce family worship. His dearest wish was to see 
his first-born a minister of the Church of Scotland. The 
estate of the Laird of Macleod was then a sort of feudal 
Utopia, in which the ruling idea was the advancement 
of the youth. There was a conspiracy of education. 
After the schoolmaster (a good hand at the classics for 
certain) came a college-bred tutor, who was maintained 
by a number of families in common. Then the Chief 
made interest at the University for his lads, and in the 
vacations entertained the professors at his castle, where 
they met their students as fellow-guests. No wonder so 
many notable lines sprang from Skye, if, as was said, 
these students were all gentlemen. 

Norman Macleod, Swordale's eldest son, having 
finished his studies for the Church, acted for some 
time as tutor in his native district. Thus he was at 
home in September 1773, and, being a favourite at 
Dunvegan — you understand ? Yes, he met Dr. Johnson. 
'And he used to tell, with great glee, how he found 
him alone in the drawing-room before dinner, poring 
over some volume on the sofa, and how the doctor, 
before rising to greet him kindly, dashed to the ground 
the volume he had been reading, exclaiming in a loud 
and angry voice, " The author is an ass ! " ? In the 
following year this young man was preferred to a parish 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



13 



which to name is to spring all the romance of the 
Highlands, — Morven. Upwards of six feet in height, 
and of a noble countenance, the stranger from Skye 
would be welcome as at least 6 a pretty man ' ; but was 
there none, in that land of seers, to foretell how this 
minister should reign in Morven, and his son after him ; 
each for half a century or more, and how he should be 
the founder of a clerical dynasty that would last for 
ever? Norman the First presents a rare figure in an 
age in which the clergy were noted for anything but 
ecclesiastical zeal. He had all the culture that was 
going, but did not prefer Horace to David, nor Virgil to 
Isaiah, and could hate fanaticism without reducing 
religion to a cauld clash of morality. He was the ideal 
of a Highland minister, daring the stormy strait and the 
misty mountain, swaying the wild Celtic heart by tender 
or fiery appeals, and drawing the poor and the troubled 
to his door from the remotest glens. The living was of 
the smallest, but he acted upon the precept, 1 Do what 
you can, and leave the rest to God.' He had a large 
family of sons and daughters, and there were various 
workers and dependents settled on the glebe. So at 
Fiunary, above the rocky shore of the Sound of Mull 
(not far from the inn where the Lad with the Silver 
Button had to go from the fireside to his bed, wading 
over the shoes), there was a little community by itself, 
living a beautiful and wholesome life. The glebe was a 
scene of cheerful industry, and, labour done, the bagpipes 



i 4 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



would be skirling. In the manse there might be a tutor 
and a governess, but the daughters were their own 
dressmakers, and the sons worked in their father's fields. 
But the chief part of their education was play; they all 
rejoiced in the open air, and Morven entered into their 
blood. The boys went fishing and sailing, hunted the 
wild cat and the otter, and roamed the heather in quest 
of game. By the winter hearth what singing of Gaelic 
songs ! The minister himself played the fiddle, and 
liked to set his children dancing of a night. In this 
family religion was no formal lesson : it was the 
atmosphere they breathed. 

One summer day in the closing year of last century, 
General Macleod, chief of the clan, visited the manse of 
Fiunary, and took away with him to Dunvegan his young 
namesake, the minister's eldest son, Norman the Second. 
Nothing could have been more delightful to the boy, who 
cared little for study, preferring any day the seas and the 
hills, and was already at sixteen a Highland patriot, with 
his head full of the legends of that old castle in the 
shadow of which his ancestors were born. The reception 
by the clan, especially the piping of a Macrimmon, was 
never to be forgotten. During his stay at Dunvegan, 
where he was treated like a son, he met many chiefs, 
some of them distinguished soldiers home from the wars. 
So he returned to Morven more a Highlander than ever, 
and with a double measure of the martial spirit that 
was then abroad in his native county. He joined the 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



T 5 



Argyllshire Fencibles, and rose to the rank of corporal ! 
If this is an anti-climax, suppose that he was moved 
less by military ardour than the love of manly exercises. 
At all events it was as an athlete that he chiefly excelled 
in his youth. The glory of his college days was that in 
physical contests he alone could rival John Wilson, who 
was to be known as Christopher North. And remember- 
ing the influences by which his character was moulded 
at home, have we not here the promise of a fresh type 
of the Christian priest? After serving for about two 
years as assistant at Kilbrandon in Lorn, he became in 
1808 minister of Campbeltown. Hardly was he settled 
in his place when a little crisis occurred in which his 
mettle was revealed. The sacrament of the Lord's 
Supper was at hand, and Macleod thought it necessary 
to have services in the open air as well as in the church. 
His fellow-presbyters, all but one, refused to assist him 
in w T hat they regarded as juvenile folly. Nothing 
daunted, the young minister had a tent set up, and on 
the Sunday morning preached to four thousand. In 
the church he held five communion services, while his 
friend in turn officiated at the tent. Towards the close, 
when the church was crammed, — passages, stairs, and 
all, — some of the fathers and brethren appeared, but 
their proposals of help were declined. In a short time 
his popularity had become such that, when there was 
a rumour of his going away, the dissenters offered 
to contribute, equally with his own people, for the 



i6 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



augmentation of his stipend. He was to rise to honour 
in the Church, and be adored throughout the Highlands ; 
but long before he died he was effaced by his son. 

At Aros, in Mull, lived Mr. Maxwell, the Duke of 
Argyll's chamberlain, a person of note in his day and 
place, and a fine man at home. He traced his descent 
to a youth who had fled from the Border, all the way to 
Kintyre, before the soldiers of Claverhouse ; and in his 
choice of reading (for one thing) he betrayed the Low- 
land strain. His daughter Agnes passed her early 
girlhood in Knapdale, where she was educated by old 
songs and ballads, and the rapture that was on the lonely 
shore. For the rest (not to speak of the inevitable 
finishing in Edinburgh), imagine Aros such another home 
school as Fiunary. The two houses stood facing each 
other on opposite sides of the Sound, and the minister's 
son — Leander in a boat — married the chamberlain's 
daughter. 

The eldest child of this pair, the third Norman, 
who may be called Norman the Great, was born in 
Campbeltown on June 3, 181 2. From his earliest 
years he was remarkable for ardent affections, the eager 
interest he took in everything, and the humour and 
imagination with which he seized his little world. Talk- 
ing and telling stories at the nursery fire, his tongue 
never lay. When only six he could mimic various 
characters of the town; and, later, he had an attic fitted 
up, in which he and his companions acted plays. For 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



i7 



study he had no aptitude, and at the burgh school the 
classics were ill taught; but he entered with a will into 
the life of the boyish community, making passionate 
friendships, contending with the 1 shore-boys,' — those 
raiders of the playground, — and heading expeditions 
against the French, and chasing pirates in a punt. But 
his great delight as a boy was to visit the vessels at the 
quay; he would spend hours on board, learning the 
name and the use of everything, and consorting with the 
sailors, — all in a world of romance. Other savours of 
life on the ocean wave he had in society, which 
abounded in naval officers, some attached to the 
revenue cruisers, some ( half - pays ' who had, perhaps, 
fought with Nelson. There also were two or three 
retired soldiers of distinction, and as many aristocratic 
spinsters (drifts from the county), living on their 
annuities, and the sheriff with his top-boots and 
queue. These, with several old families of the place, 
and the usual dignitaries of a burgh, were the quality ; 
and, cut off as they were from the rest of the world 
(Campbeltown being then as an ocean isle for isolation), 
they make a quaint picture, like a set in some ancient 
novel. Norman mixed in this company, and the heroes 
of the services, and the queer old maids — he saw them 
every one, and was glad. Not less did he mark the 
fishermen's sons, with their ' codlike faces and huge 
hands like flat-fish,' or the fools and beggars that were 
the heroes of the streets. This varied and stirring 
2 



i8 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



experience, which was of inestimable account in the 
making of the man, fell in with the ideal of training that 
had been set at Fiunary. 

But in Campbeltown the boy could not grow up to be 
a Highlander after his father's heart ; so in his twelfth 
year he was sent to Morven. The old minister was now 
gone, and his youngest son was reigning in his stead. 
Norman was boarded with the parish schoolmaster, his 
business being to learn Gaelic and get acquainted with 
the peasantry. Many an evening he spent in some 
hut, — the floor the bare earth, the ceiling a roost for 
hens ; around the fire (which was in the middle of the 
apartment, the smoke escaping through a hole in the 
roof) a group would gather, — the lasses knitting, the lads 
busking hooks ; and, heedless of the storm, they made 
the hours fly, telling tales and singing songs of their 
land. He gloried in the shore, and was to be seen 
perched upon a rock, fishing the deep pools. With his 
relatives, again (who claimed him when the school- 
week was over), he wandered on moor and mountain, or 
if they went sailing in the Sound, they would sometimes 
camp for the night on some distant island, and see the 
loveliest dawns. 

Here the romance of Norman's boyhood came to an 
end; he was to exchange Morven, not for ships and 
sailors, but for a far other environment in the Lowlands. 
In 1825 his father was presented by the Crown, on the 
recommendation of all the principal heritors, lo Campsie, 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



19 



a parish in Stirlingshire, within twelve miles of Glasgow. 
The minister accepted the living for the sake of his 
family, but it cost him some pangs to leave his con- 
gregation. 'I preached my farewell sermon/ he says 
in his fragment of autobiography, 'and could I have 
known beforehand the scene which I then witnessed, 
and the feelings that I myself experienced, I do believe 
that no inducement could have tempted me to leave 
them.' In his new parish there was a large manufactur- 
ing population ; yet he might almost have forgotten that 
he was not in the Highlands, the rural part being a 
mountainous wild, and the manse near that goal of 
excursions, Campsie Glen. The church was a wretched 
little structure, and away in the country; but the 
minister set to work, and, after much trouble, had a 
new one built in the town. For the sake of his 
countrymen, of whom there were many in the parish, 
he held special services in their native tongue ; and it 
was during this period of his ministry that he began his 
career as a literary apostle to the Gaelic-speaking race. 

Of Norman as a boy in Campsie there is nothing 
to tell, except that he attended the parish school ; nay, 
and there is a letter in which he complains, with a 
twinkle in his eye, of having salmon and legs of roasted 
lamb crammed down his throat. ■ O my dear mamma, 
it is only now that a fond mother is missed, when 
dangers and misfortunes assail us.' Hardly less meagre 
is the record of his early college life ; indeed, before we 



20 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



get a full view of the student he is a man, and the 
strange thing is not that he was undistinguished in his 
classes, but that (so far as appears) he was not even 
interested in the academic scene. In 1827, when he 
entered the University, the old College of Glasgow — now 
a railway station — and the old High Street — now a sani- 
tary thoroughfare — were as they had been in the days 
of Andrew Melville, — the one with its hoary walls and 
turrets, the other with its picturesque narrows; and in 
the grounds there was still that 'sort of wilderness' 
where the duel of the two Osbaldistones was stopped 
by Rob Roy. But Norman, the most voluminous of 
diarists, has no w T ord of the history or romance of the 
place ; nor of his fellow-students, though he might have 
remarked one Tait (already with the grave brows 
befitting an archbishop), and a certain youth in home- 
spun, with wild eyes and flaming hair, George Gilfillan ; 
nor yet of his professors, among whom at least three 
were worthy of note, — Sir Daniel Sandford, the brilliant 
Grecian and fervid orator, Robert Buchanan, of whom, 
under the name of ' Logic Bob,' reminiscences may be 
heard to this day in manses, and one less distinguished 
in his place, but likely to be remembered longest, 
because he was the friend and biographer of Burns, 
Josiah Walker. Macleod was nicknamed 1 the sailor ' ; 
he wore the dress and affected the gait of a Jack tar. 
For learning, he dabbled in science and read poetry, 
especially Shakespeare and Wordsworth. At home, 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



21 



whither he repaired on the Fridays, he was all fun and 
frolic, and carried mimicry so far that he would speak in 
any character but his own. 1 Cease your buffoonery/ his 
father wrote, and (unkindest cut of all) i I was much 
pleased with the manner of the Stewart boys.' But this 
humour was an extravagant form of that sympathy which 
was to make him great. Good Stewart boys ! 1 on'y,' as 
Long John says, 4 where are they?' In after years 
Macleod bitterly regretted his neglect of scholarship, 
feeling himself at a certain disadvantage in an age 
of intellectual ferment. But every man to his vocation, 
and that of Norman Macleod was the therapeutics of 
religion. For that he was unconsciously preparing 
himself by his absorption in the panorama of existence. 
He knew he was to be a minister, but he could 
never have been the man his country admired, had 
his boyish thoughts been focussed on his destination, 
and not taken up with comrades, and the appearances 
of life. 

Soon he was to hear, in the lectures of Chalmers, a 
trumpet call. Having finished the curriculum of Arts, 
he proceeded in 1831 to the Divinity Hall at Edinburgh, 
w r here, at the feet of the first of Scottish ministers and 
men, he awoke to the seriousness and mystery of life, and 
anticipated with joy his part in the evangelical crusade. 
Chalmers, alike by his teaching and his character, was 
singularly fitted to be the spiritual master of Macleod. 
Almost at once they recognised each other for kindred 



22 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



natures, and the sympathy of the pupil was repaid 
by the professor's trust. 

Another influence at this period went to deepen his 
religious feelings, the death of a brother. He had that 
passionate attachment to relatives in general which 
marks the Celt, and between Norman and James there 
had been a peculiar bond of affection. On the last 
occasion of their meeting, Norman had engaged in 
prayer (for the first time in company), and the invalid 
had said, * I am so thankful, mother ; Norman will be 
a good man.' The death of James was not only an 
awful blow at the moment, it marks an epoch in the 
other's life. Immediately after the bereavement, Norman 
wrote — ' I know not, my own brother, whether you now 
see me or not. If you know my heart, you will know 
my love for you, and that in passing through this 
pilgrimage, I shall never forget you, who accompanied 
me so far.' Nor did he ever forget ; again and again, 
and long years after, he recalled that pale face, and 
thought of immortality. 

On the recommendation of Chalmers, Macleod had 
been appointed tutor to a young English gentleman, the 
son of Henry Preston, of Moreby Hall, Yorkshire. In 
the spring of 1834, at the close of his theological course 
at Edinburgh, he went with his pupil to Weimar, 
carrying letters for the ducal Court. These were from 
Lady Vavasour, who had drilled him 1 how to speak to 
Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess, sister to 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



23 



the late Empress of Russia.' The Court of Weimar ! 
that was indeed a change. But there and thereabout 
he was to be for a whole year, mixing in the very society 
which, a few years before, had been adorned by Goethe. 
'There are indeed many advantages for young men 
here,' the seer wrote to Carlyle in 1828, 8 especially for 
those of your own country. The Double-Court of the 
reigning Grand Duke and the Hereditary Family, at 
which they are always kindly and generously received, 
constrains them by this mark of distinction to a refined 
demeanour at social entertainments of various kinds.' 
Imagine Norman waltzing at the State balls, dressed in 
cocked hat and sword, with silk stockings and buckled 
shoes, and haunting the gardens, the cafes, the theatres, 
and the glorious park ' where the nightingales never 
ceased to sing.' Nevertheless he kept his head, con- 
stituting himself mentor (always a favourite role of 
his) to the young English residents. As he observed 
the German laxity he called for a new Luther, though 
he condemned the contrary vice of the Church at 
home, that would measure his piety by his reading a 
newspaper on Sunday. He made excursions, one as far 
as the Tyrol, in the course of which he visited the 
picture galleries of Vienna, Munich, and Dresden. But 
the great event of his life in Weimar was his falling in 
love with the Court beauty, — c La Baronne,' he calls 
her, — which he did in a fashion of poetic worship, 
worthy of a hero of romance or song. For years 



2 4 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



afterwards, let him hear old Weimar tunes upon the 
piano, and his heart will overflow with thoughts that he 
cannot utter ; a German waltz, and his brain will reel. 

In the autumn of 1835, after a residence of some 
months at Moreby Hall, where he mingled with the 
local squires, and met certain legislators fresh from 
St. Stephen's, he entered the Divinity Hall at Glasgow. 
But he did not now cross the quadrangle as if it were 
a ship's deck. For one thing, he was no longer an idle 
student, but rose at unearthly hours to grind, or if he 
did not, his conscience put in for damages, which took 
the form of pages of eloquent remorse. Besides, he 
was a great handsome fellow, and, not to speak of his 
inner life, — so vitalised by various experience,— he had 
seen more than most Scottish students. Add his 
conversational powers and boundless vivacity, and he 
should be something of a lion in college society. He 
became the leader of the Tories, and it was in that 
capacity that he had his first taste of fame. At the 
Scottish Universities there falls to be elected by the 
students, once in three years, an honorary official called 
the Lord Rector. The candidates are usually leaders in 
the rival political camps. In Glasgow there seemed to 
be no chance for a Tory, — men like Jeffrey, Brougham, 
Cockburn, and Stanley having carried the day time 
out of mind; — but in 1836, under Norman Macleod's 
leadership, the Whig tradition was broken by the 
triumphant return of Sir Robert Peel. At the Peel 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



25 



Banquet, which is almost historical, as the rise of the 
Tory tide dates from the oration delivered by the 
honoured guest, Norman made his first public 
appearance, replying to the toast of the Conservative 
students. 6 1 think I can see him now,' says Principal 
Shairp, ' standing forth prominently conspicuous to the 
whole vast assemblage, his dark hair, glossy as a black- 
cock's wing, massed over his forehead, the purple hue 
of youth on his cheek.' His speech was striking, and 
impressed even Peel. Thus, if the first period of his 
college career was obscure, the last ended in a blaze 
of glory. 

The family were now resident in Glasgow (his father 
having been translated to St. Columba's), and in the 
house a number of young gentlemen, some of them 
boarders, pursued their college studies under Norman's 
supervision. The scene of their work was ' the coffee- 
room,' and it was always a great moment when their 
tutor burst in upon them from his own den, radiant 
with life and joy. Among them was John Macintosh 
and John Campbell Shairp. Macintosh had come from 
Edinburgh with the laurels of first pupil of the New 
Academy. In Glasgow College he was at the head 
of all his classes, and his scholarship was not more 
remarkable than his piety. He was the sort of boy 
that takes all the prizes, including the prize for good 
conduct. As for Shairp, there is no one with a know- 
ledge of the best Scotsmen of the last generation but 



26 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



reveres and loves the memory of that gifted and high- 
souled man. Though Macleod was more impressed by 
the saintly Macintosh, he found in Shairp, owing to the 
wider range of their mutual sympathies, a fitter companion. 
They were both Wordsworthians. Macleod could tell 
how his enthusiasm had once carried him to Ambleside, 
how he had seen and talked with the poet, how the 
old man had appeared in a brown greatcoat and a 
large straw hat, and had read l in his deep voice some 
of his own imperishable verses.' The two students, many 
a night under the frosty starlight, walking home from 
the Peel Club (of which Macleod was president), kept 
firing at each other quotations from their favourite 
bard. 

For Wordsworth's poetry Macleod had been prepared, 
because its materials were within his own emotional 
experience. Passage after passage only interpreted and 
defined for him feelings which he had long known 
in the presence of wild nature. Of the influences 
that went to form his moral constitution not the least 
marked was that of Highland scenery. Even amidst 
the gaieties of Weimar, he would shut his eyes, and, 
whistling a Highland tune, see the old hills. The 
autumn after he was licensed — 1837 — the last before 
his life-work began — was spent in Morven and Skye. 
He speaks of 'passionate hours in the lonely moun- 
tains,' and, to judge from his journal, his excitement 
in these scenes was wonderful, varying from ecstatic 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



27 



delight to solemn awe and worship. On a peak of 
the Coolins he burst out singing the Hundredth Psalm. 
Along with this must be taken his keen consciousness 
of the hereditary associations. During his holiday 
he preached in 'the same pulpit where once stood a 
revered grandfather and father.' 'As I went to the 
church/ he writes, ' hardly a stone or knoll but spoke 
of something which was gone, and past days crowded 
upon me like the ghosts of Ossian, and seemed, like 
them, to ride even on the passing wind and along the 
mountain tops. What a marvellous, mysterious world is 
this, that I in this pulpit, the third generation, should 
now, by the grace of God, be keeping the truth alive on 
the earth, and telling how faithful has been the God of 
our fathers.' 



CHAPTER II 



1838-1843 

LOUDOUN — NON-INTRUSION CONTROVERSY 

Just after his return from this tour, Macleod was pre- 
sented, virtually at the instance of Chalmers, to the living 
of Loudoun, in Ayrshire. On March 5, 1838, he was 
ordained. From this time onward his private journal 
is largely the record of religious introspection. With 
the other earnest ministers of that period, he took up the 
feelings and the language of the old Puritans. One 
cannot forget Robertson, on his appointment to the 
charge of Ellon, pacing the room for hours in the silence 
of the night, 4 and, all unconscious of being overheard, 
praying for mercy to pardon his sin and grace to help 
him in his embassy for Christ.' This is good to know, 
but a little of it goes a long way. When my brother has 
entered into his closet and shut the door, I do not wish 
to spy upon his spiritual straits, or listen at the keyhole 
to his penitential groans. That Macleod, on assuming 
his first ministerial charge, deeply felt his responsibility, 

is clear from his doings as well as from his diary. The 

28 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



29 



young minister had never doubted the truth of the 
religion which, more by example than by precept, had 
come down to him from his fathers. And the doctrines 
of Christianity were to him not merely true, they were 
vividly realised in his heart and imagination. In criti- 
cism, at this time, his highest flight was to name certain 
antinomies of Calvinism as nuts to crack. On the other 
hand, in his frank acceptance of the goodly world, and 
in his passion for characters (which was such that he 
would go scouting for the ludicrous), he seemed to have 
more of the humanist than the saintly temperament. 
Nothing could have been more alien to him than the 
plaint of a latter-day poet — 

1 Strange the world about me lies, 

Never yet familiar grown, 
Still disturbs me with surprise, 

Haunts me like a face half-known.' 

And he had met in Germany, somewhat to his astonish- 
ment, men who danced on a Sunday, and still showed 
Christian graces ; nay, men who were reverent and 
pious, though they could not have subscribed to the 
Westminster Confession. 

The parish of Loudoun is a broad green wooded 
valley, through which runs the Irvine Water, celebrated 
in song. At one end, on a pleasant slope, the towers 
of the castle shine out above the trees \ at the other, 
several miles distant, lie the villages of Newmilns and 
Darvel, where the mass of the population resided. The 



3° 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



farmers were a sturdy, pious race, as befitted the descend- 
ants of the Covenanters ; but in the weavers Macleod 
encountered a new and formidable type of sinner. The 
eighteenth century had spoken to their fathers ; on 
matters of religion their authority was Tom Paine; of 
politics, Robespierre qualified by Chartism. Thus the 
minister, whose business, as he conceived it, was to pilot 
souls to heaven, had no sooner taken the helm than he 
found himself among rocks and breakers. He was little 
of a politician, and no priest, which was fortunate, as a 
formal defence of the Church or of Toryism against such 
antagonists would have been the worst tactics ; but, being 
a ntati) he got hold of many of the weavers in the end. 
" Poor souls ! " he could say ; " how I do love the working 
classes ! " and that was a note he never lost. Besides 
the human, he approached them on the secular ground. 
On geology, which was then a fine new weapon to the 
adversaries of the Church, he gave a course of lectures 
which made a sensation, particularly among the hand- 
loom atheists, many of whom became communicants. 

The moral condition of Newmilns was terrible in the 
young pastor's eyes, and he would sometimes despair, 
thinking that all his efforts were in vain. There was in 
him some touch of the divine yearning, ' O Jerusalem, 
Jerusalem ! ' If he woke in the night-time, he communed 
with God. Far from flagging, the ambassador for Christ 
piled agencies on means, and, as it were, took the place 
by storm. The church was crowded to suffocation ; he 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



3 1 



preached on week-days in various parts of the parish, 
instituted Sunday schools, prayer meetings, and meetings 
for young men ; and, for the sake of the poorest of the 
poor, held services to which none were admitted who 
wore good clothes. In the course of a year he would 
visit several thousand families, and as in public he 
denounced evil-doers in general, in private he singled 
them out for rebuke and exhortation. 

In his Loudoun ministry there is just perceptible an 
official smack, a note of externality ; he has not yet 
entirely freed himself from the mechanical theory of 
salvation. For example, he was much taken up with the 
work of winning or, if need were, extorting confessions 
of repentance and faith from dying unbelievers. There 
was one with whom the zealous young ambassador strove 
hard, all to induce the invalid to speak. 1 Before I go 
have you nothing to say?' The man lifted up his 
skeleton hand and panted out — 1 No, no, noth — 
nothing.' At a later period Macleod would rather have 
sympathised with the poet, who wanted no priest — 

1 — to canvass with official breath 
The future and its viewless things, 
That undiscovered mystery 
Which one who feels death's winnowing wings 
Must needs read clearer, sure, than he.' 

The manse of Loudoun is a little way out of Newmilns, 
in the direction of the castle, and overlooking the road ; 
on one side, a pretty garden, and at the back the glebe, 



3* 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



a beautiful brae. In that very house Robert Burns o-nce 
spent a night. Coming down in the morning, he was 
asked whether he had slept well. e 1 have been praying 
all night,' the poet answered ; £ if you go up to my room 
you will find my prayers on the table/ He had been 
thinking of the sweet life of the household and all he 
might have been. But this tradition did not move 
Macleod ; indeed, at that time he was unjust to the poet, 
as what cleric was not ? Invited to take the chair at a 
Burns Festival in Newmilns, he replied (disloyal to 
Wordsworth for once) that he could not, dared not, as a 
Christian minister, commemorate such a man. 

His life at Loudoun, notwithstanding his professional 
industry, was full of brightness and charm. Much of 
his leisure was passed among his flowers, or he went into 
the woods and sat listening to the birds. In the winter 
evenings, to his sister Jane, who kept house for him, he 
read aloud from the works of Shakespeare, Scott, and, 
a new writer, Dickens ; and she in turn entertained him 
with German sonatas and Gaelic songs. At Loudoun 
Castle, then inhabited by the Dowager Marchioness of 
Hastings, widow of the celebrated Governor-General, he 
was not only a welcome guest, but a trusted friend. His 
conversational gifts might account for his acceptability 
at the tables of the great, but he was never the mere 
diner-out, still less the nice chaplain. In any company 
he would speak, when occasion offered, from the heart 
to the heart, and it was at first startling to see the laugh 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



33 



die out of the face of the big jolly parson, and hear 
sudden lessons or tales that shook the inmost soul, and 
drew the awkward tear. Lady Hastings gave him the key 
of a vault in Loudoun Kirk where lay the right hand 
of her dead husband, which had been sent from Malta ; 
and, sure enough one morning, as the Marchioness lay 
dying, he was summoned to fetch the relic that it might 
be buried in her grave. 

The 1 coffee-room fellows 1 held reunions at Loudoun. 
Referring to one of these, Shairp says : 'We wandered by 
the side of the Irvine Water, and under the woods, all 
about Loudoun Castle, and Norman was, as of old, the soul 
of the party. He recurred to his old Glasgow stories, or 
told us new ones derived from his brief experience of 
the Ayrshire people, in whom, and in their characters, he 
was already deeply interested. All day we spent out of 
doors i and as we lay, in that balmy weather, on the banks 
or under the shade of the newly-budding trees, converse 
more hearty it would be impossible to conceive.' 

Through Shairp (who was now a student of Oxford) 
he was kept abreast of the Tractarian movement ; not to 
his peace of mind, for he was protestant and presbyterian 
to the core. Once, while staying at Moreby, he had 
attended a magnificent confirmation ceremony in York 
Minster, but his raptures over the stained windows and 
1 the great organ booming like thunder through the never- 
ending arches ' suddenly vanished in the recollection of 
a sacramental scene which he had witnessed in the 
3 



34 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Highlands — 4 no minster but the wide heaven, no organ 
but the roar of the eternal sea, the church with its lonely 
churchyard and primitive congregation.' So far from 
having any leanings to High Churchism, he saw no harm 
in a layman administering the sacrament of the Lord's 
Supper. Another sign is that, Highlander as he was, he 
had no sympathy with the Jacobites ; he said that Charlie 
was never his darling, and spoke of the low cunning and 
tyrannical spirit of the Stuarts. The Anglo-Catholic 
movement he simply abhorred. ' Well,' he wrote to 
Shairp, c what think you of Puseyism now ? You have 
read No. 90, of course, — you have read the article on 
Transubstantiation, — you have read it ! Great heavens ! 
is this 1841?' Shairp, who wet his feet in the rising 
tide, piped in vain to his friend about the greatness of 
Newman. Macleod could not understand a beautiful 
soul who spent his mornings in idolatry, a sage of the 
nineteenth century for whom the only question was — 
Anglican Church or Roman ? 

Into what hole, Bezonian ? speak or die. 

Protestantism is more than a creed. Men may rail at 
the Scarlet Woman, and yet, in the matter of ecclesiastical 
claims, be little Beckets. In the non-intrusion con- 
troversy, such as it was in the end, Macleod's attitude 
was partly determined by his dislike of sacerdotal 
pretensions. Since the law courts had declared the 
measures of the General Assembly illegal, the non- 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



35 



intrusionists had set themselves up against the judges, 
and in the course of their defiance were justifying, by 
word and deed, Milton's saying, that 'new presbyter was 
just old priest writ large.' The question was not now 
of patronage, but of the Headship of Christ, the crown- 
rights of the Redeemer ; practically the old quarrel 
between priests and kings. 

As to the necessity of checking the power of the patron 
there was not from the first any difference between the 
two sides. Everybody recognised that the people, 
having won political freedom, would have a voice in 
the appointment of ministers. To patronage, indeed, 
the Scots never consented, were never reconciled ; they 
always looked upon it as a wrong, they could always 
say, 'An enemy hath done this.' Both Knox and 
Melville asserted the right of the people to elect their 
ministers, and the Kirk, as often as it had the chance, 
got rid of patronage. The evil seemed to be cast out 
for ever at the Revolution, but in 1712 it was sur- 
reptitiously restored. The Act of Queen Anne, which 
was nothing but a Jacobite intrigue, handing over the 
Kirk to the Pretender's friends, was introduced behind 
the nation's back, and passed in spite of the strenuous 
opposition of the General Assembly. For many years 
and in various ways the Kirk tried to get it repealed. 
In a single decade there were upwards of fifty disputed 
settlements before the courts, and about the middle of 
the century the dissenters numbered a hundred thousand. 



36 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



To make matters worse, the party which, under the name 
of Moderates, systematically championed the patrons, 
rose to absolute power in the Kirk. Before a presentee 
could be settled he had to receive the call, a document 
in his favour signed by the heads of families : this the 
Moderates treated as a mere form, and minimised it 
more and more till they got quit of it altogether — except 
the name. Ministers were inducted with the military 
at their back. At length, weary of the struggle, the 
people gave in, and the descendants of the Covenanters 
endured intrusion almost dumbly for twenty years, under 
the iron rule of Robertson. As Dr. Chalmers said in 
his grandiose way : ' The best, the holiest feelings of our 
Scottish patriarchs, by lordly oppressors, sitting in state 
and judgment, were barbarously scorned.' 

After the French Revolution the awakening of man's 
spirit, extending from letters and politics to religion, led 
in Scotland to the rise of the Evangelical party. They 
had lofty notions of ecclesiastical authority, and mani- 
fested their pious zeal in prosecuting men whose holi- 
ness was qualified by originality, such as Macleod 
Campbell, whom they incontinently deposed. But, for 
all that, they were the best of the clergy, because they 
were in vital earnest with the highest things. 

What was their policy on the question of intrusion ? 
In some way it should prevent the patron from thrusting 
in a minister against the will of the congregation. The 
General Assembly of 1834, the first in which the 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



37 



Evangelicals outnumbered the Moderates, conferred 
upon the majority of heads of families (being communi- 
cants) the right of vetoing, without assigning reasons, 
the settlement of a presentee. Now it is conceivable 
that one might be eager for reform, and yet disapprove 
of the Veto Law. To be sure it was fitted to stopr 
intrusion, but, as the records of its operation show, it 
would have led to another evil, the vetoing of presentees 
on trivial and absurd pretexts, rejection for rejection's 
sake. Popular election entails complete responsibility, 
but when men have to take their ministers from a 
patron, and yet can refuse one presentee after another 
without saying why, they will be apt to use their licence 
to make up for their slavery. This were hardly worth 
remarking but for the assumption, conveyed in many an 
oration, that the policy was as admirable as the principle 
which it embodied. Let the non-intrusionists have all the 
praise of meeting, in some sort, the just claim of the people. 

The General Assembly, however, had gone beyond its 
powers. Both the House of Lords and the Court of 
Session pronounced the Veto Law to be ultra vires, the 
judges holding that the presbytery was bound to take on 
trials any presentee to whom there was no objection on 
the ground of morals, scholarship, or doctrine. Notwith- 
standing this, the General Assembly stuck to the veto. 
So there would be rejected presentees demanding, in 
accordance with the law, to be taken on trials, and 
presbyteries at their wits' end, pulled one way by the 



38 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



General Assembly, and another way by the civil Court. 
The General Assembly ordered the presbytery of Strath- 
bogie not to take on trials a certain presentee who had 
been vetoed. The presbytery obeyed. But the Court of 
Session declared the order of the General Assembly to 
be illegal. Thereupon the presbytery, by a majority of 
seven, admitted the presentee. For that the seven were 
deposed. And now came the event which was the cause 
of the Disruption. The minority in the General Assembly, 
failing to see how it could be rebellion to obey the law 
of the land, treated the deposition of these men as null 
and void. The question then was, which of the two sides 
was the Church of Scotland ? Parliament, all the time, 
was trying to reconcile parties by changes in the law, but 
as it always insisted on making the presbytery the final 
judge of the fitness of presentees, the non-intrusionists 
would not hear of legislation. 

It was not till near the end of the struggle that the 
minister of Loudoun turned his eyes upon the field. The 
thunder of the captains and the shouting had been long 
in his ears without stirring him to action. He was all in 
his vocation, the cure of souls, — the mystery of existence 
ever for him insurgent, whether he looked on life and 
death, or remembered his days upon the hills. 4 1 wished/ 
he said, ' to keep out of this row, and to do my Master's 
work and will in my dear, dear parish.' Some clerics are 
listless in religion ; but when a question of church politics 
is raised, alert as a horse at the sound of the trumpet. 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



39 



Macleod hated controversy, and said it was the worst 
way of doing good. Of the two parties in the Church he 
might have sung, 1 How happy could I be with neither ! ' 
In him the opposing types were blended ; he had all the 
humanism which marked the one, — the love of letters, 
the relish of things, the superiority to clerical prejudice, — 
with all the zeal of the other for the cause of the gospel. 
But, called to choose between extremes, he preferred 
c the cold gentlemanly Moderate ' to ' the loud-speaking 
high professor/ And the non-intrusionists were claiming 
to be the only true Christian ministers in the land, nay 
more, the chosen of Heaven. They declared that they 
were raised up by God, they called themselves the fitting 
instrument of the Lord. They invaded the parishes 
of the Moderate clergy, and preached, telling the people 
that now, for the first time, the gospel was in their ears. 
' The Lord Jesus Christ/ they said, 1 will have left the 
Church when we go.' In a pamphlet written by 
Macleod, 4 A Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk/ 
which had a large sale, Saunders observes : c I ken 
mony that are foremost eneuch in this steer that in my 
opinion hae little o' the meekness and gentleness o' 
Christ.' He must have been thinking of the minister 
who said that 1 the devil was preparing a cradle in 
hell for the opposition.' Everything in the popular 
cause was exaggerated. Patronage was ' earthly, sensual, 
devilish ' ; vox populi, vox Dei^ and no mistake. The 
struggle against the civil courts was 1 one of the most 



4 o 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



illustrious conflicts for the spirituality and liberty of the 
Church of Christ of which any record can be found either 
in modern or in ancient times.' What Macleod could least 
endure in the non-intrusionists was their sacerdotal temper. 
They insisted on remaining in an Established Church, 
while flying in the face of the law by which it was estab- 
lished. The Headship of Christ was bound up with the 
resolutions of the General Assembly, and to obey an order 
of the Court of Session was to crucify the Lord afresh. 

As for patronage, Macleod was probably willing that it 
should be abolished altogether, but he could not support 
the veto in defiance of the declared law of the Church. 
1 I'm desperate keen for gude reform,' says Saunders 
again, c and would like the folk to hae mair poo'er, but I 
would like to get it in a legal way.' Macleod believed that 
the Establishment was necessary for the religious welfare 
of the country, and saw nothing that was worth the risk 
of its existence. Not till it became evident that the non- 
intrusionists were bent on destroying the Church did he 
join in the conflict. ' It will be our bounden duty,' one 
of the leaders had said, ' to use every effort that if we be 
driven out, they shall be driven out too ; it is our bounden 
duty to bear this testimony that the Church ought to be 
established on the principles which we are contending 
for, or that there should be no establishment in the land 
at all.' When things like that were being said, Macleod, 
in alarm, plunged into the whole literature of the contro- 
versy. The position he reached was this, that when there 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



4* 



was a dispute as to the privileges granted by the State 
to the Church, it was for the civil court to interpret the 
terms of the contract. He became one of the Forty, a 
set of Independents, whose chief distinction is that they 
promoted parliamentary legislation for the reform of 
patronage. While opposed to the revolutionary policy, 
they were not Moderates, for they countenanced some of 
the acts of the majority. They were as little for Erastus 
as for Hildebrand. 

A non - intrusionist deputation came to Newmilns. 
Macleod allowed them to harangue in the church, but 
he took care to be present, and when they invited the 
auditors to sign certain resolutions, springing up, he 
asked the people to wait till they heard from their 
minister the other side of the question. ' The evening 
came, and the church was crammed with all sects and 
parties. I do believe I never had a greater pressure on 
my soul than I had before this meeting. I did not so 
much possess the subject as the subject possessed me. 
Between anxiety to do right and a feeling of degradation 
that I should be looked upon by even one Christian 
brother as inimical to the Church of Scotland, not to 
speak of the Church of Christ, I was so overcome that 
during the singing of the psalm — 

1 ' Therefore I wish that peace may still 
Within Thy walls remain " — 

I wept like a very child. I spoke, however, for three 



42 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



and a half hours, and not a soul moved ! . . . The result 
has been most gratifying. Of ten elders not one has left 
me. The people are nearly unanimous, or at all events 
so attached to me personally that they are about to present 
to me a gold watch and an address from all parties.' 

About the same time (February 1843) circumstances 
compelled him to take action in the presbytery. Along 
. with the Veto Law the Chapel Act had been passed, 
giving seats in the church courts to the ministers of 
non-territorial charges. The House of Lords had just 
declared that also to be illegal, when the Presbytery 
of Irvine met to elect commissioners to the General 
Assembly. The minister of Loudoun happened to be 
Moderator. Should he allow the chapel ministers to 
vote ? There was more in his mind than the law ; 1 it 
was the avowed intention/ he says, 4 of the High Church 
party to get the majority in the Assembly by means of 
the Quoad Sacras . . . and then, as the Assembly of the 
National Church, to dissolve the connection between 
Church and State, excommunicating those who might 
remain.' Refusing the illegal votes, he set up a separate 
presbytery ; and here was the first actual split in the 
Church. 

Of all the members of the General Assembly who wit- 
nessed or took part in the procession from St. Andrew's 
Church on May 18, 1843, there were none more sorrow- 
ful than the minister of Loudoun. But ere the day 
was over a little indignation came to his relief. ' How 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



43 



my soul rises against those men who have left us to 
rectify their blundering, and then laugh at our inability 
to do so ! ' Principal Tulloch has said that the act of 
secession would always be deemed heroic in the history 
of Scotland; but Norman Macleod, who, unlike the other, 
was an eye-witness and in the thick of events, wrote 
in his journal immediately after the Disruption : 1 The 
great movements, the grand results, will certainly be 
known, and everything has been done in the way most 
calculated to tell on posterity (for how many have been 
acting before its eyes !) : but who in the next century 
will know or understand the ten thousand secret 
influences, the vanity and pride of some, the love of 
applause, the fear and terror, of others, and, above all, 
the seceding mania, the revolutionary mesmerism, which 
I have witnessed within these few days. 5 For himself 
he felt how much easier it would have been to go than 
it was to stay. 1 Never,' he wrote, ' did I have such a fort- 
night of care and anxiety. Never did men engage in a task 
with more oppression of spirit than we did, as we tried 
to preserve the Church for the benefit of our children's 
children. The Assembly was called upon to perform a 
work full of difficulty, and to do such unpopular things 
as restoring the Strathbogie ministers, rescinding the 
Veto, etc. We were hissed by the mob in the galleries, 
looked coldly on by many Christians, ridiculed as 
enemies to the true Church, as lovers of ourselves, 
seeking the fleece; and yet what was nearest my own 



44 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



heart and that of my friends was the wish to preserve the 
Establishment for the well-being of Britain. While the 
"persecuted martyrs of the Covenant" met amid the 
huzzas and applauses of the multitude, with thousands 
of pounds daily pouring in upon them, and nothing to 
do but what was in the highest degree popular ; nothing 
but self-denial, and a desire to sacrifice name and fame, 
and all but honour, to my country, could have kept 
me in the Assembly. There was one feature of the 
Assembly which I shall never forget, and that was the 
fever of secession, the restless, nervous desire to fly to 
the Free Church.' In the course of one of his speeches 
in the rump Assembly he exclaimed: "We shall 
endeavour to extinguish the fire which has been kindled, 
and every fire but the light of the glorious gospel, which 
we shall, I hope, fan into a brighter flame. And the 
beautiful spectacle which was presented to us on Sab- 
bath evening, in the dense crowd assembled here to ask 
the blessing of God on our beloved Church, enabled me 
to distinguish amid the flames the old motto flashing 
out, Nec tamen consumebatur. We shall try to bring our 
ship safe to harbour, and if we haul down the one flag, 
"Retract : no, never," we shall hoist another, " Despair : 
no, never." And if I live to come to this Assembly an old 
man, I am confident that a grateful posterity will vindicate 
our present position, in endeavouring through good report 
and bad report to preserve this great national institution 
as a blessing to them and to their children's children.' 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



45 



The Free Church was always in his eyes ' just an 
outburst of presbyterian Puseyism,' and undoubtedly 
its rise was marked by a clerical reign of terror. Mr. 
Skelton testifies : ' The air of Edinburgh is generally 
bitter with Calvinism, and in 1843 it was particularly 
inclement. The Free Kirk, having just made a heroic 
sacrifice, were naturally rather out of temper. Cakes 
and ale, consequently, were quite at a discount. The 
re-enactment of the old sumptuary laws of the Puritans 
began to be talked of again. The national beverage was 
interdicted. Young professors could not be permitted 
to indulge in promiscuous dancing. The presbytery 
thundered hoarsely against the profanation of the Sabbath 
as practised on Leith Pier, or round Arthur's Seat. 
The slightest sign of independent vitality, intellectual 
or religious, was sourly repressed by a party in which 
the secular intolerance of the democracy was curiously 
combined with the spiritual pretensions of the hierarchy.' 
'A gloomy fanaticism,' writes the father of Norman 
Macleod, ' followed the breaking up of the Established 
Church, and perhaps in no part of the country did this 
bitterness exist more strongly than in the Western 
Islands. In Skye, especially, it led to dividing families, 
and separating man from man, and altogether engendered 
strife which I fear it will take years to calm down.' 

Although too young, even if he had been fit, to be in 
the front of the battle, the minister of Loudoun was 
notable among the remnant ; and with his repute, besides, 



4 6 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



as a pastor, it was no wonder that he was besieged with 
offers of livings. He refused the first charge of Cupar, 
Fife; the Tolbooth and St. John's, Edinburgh; Campsie, 
Maybole, St. Ninian's. He accepted Dalkeith. Then he 
learned how much his people at Loudoun were attached 
to him. Many whom he had thought rocks sent forth 
tears. At the church gate, after his farewell sermon, 
there was a mournful crowd ; and as he walked home he 
was w r aylaid by watchers, who seized his hand, and 
invoked upon him the blessing of God. 



CHAPTER III 



1843-1851 

AFTER THE BATTLE — DALKEITH — EMBASSIES — EVAN- 
GELICAL ALLIANCE — DEATH OF JOHN MACINTOSH. 

That he should have chosen Dalkeith when he had the 
chance of going to Edinburgh has been remarked as 
strange. ' I prefer/ he said in explanation, ' a country 
parish to a town, because the fever and excitement and 
the kind of work on Sabbath days and week days in 
Edinburgh would do me much harm bodily and 
spiritually.' This is not enough, and indeed, though he 
did not state them, he confessed that he had other 
reasons. As the citadel of a glorying dissent, Edinburgh 
would scarcely be inviting to a man of his temperament. 
And it is clear that his mind had been stirred to its 
depths by the secession. At Dalkeith he would have 
leisure for reading and reflection, and yet be close to the 
headquarters of the Church. 

Of all those who remained in the Establishment, none 
saw more clearly, or more deeply deplored, the havoc 

that had been made by the Disruption, than the minister 

47 



48 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



of Dalkeith. He had started joyously upon his career, 
intent on proclaiming the gospel of brotherhood and love, 
and, behold, the Church rent asunder, those that were 
brethren at daggers drawn, and all over the land, even 
to the family altar, embittering divisions ! To a mind 
like his it seemed horrible to stand for ecclesiastical 
principles at such cost to the kingdom of God in 
the heart. Never for a moment had he any misgivings 
as to the side which he had taken in the great 
controversy. Nay, he thought that, after all, the 
Establishment might have been in the end more 
irrevocably shattered had the High Church party re- 
mained within. He veered between angry lamentation 
over the coldness and indifference of the Moderates, 
and aversion from the faults of the new zealots — 
'vanity, pride, and haughtiness that would serve 
Mazarin or Richelieu, clothed in Quaker garb ; church 
ambition and zeal and self-sacrifice that compete with 
Loyola ; and in the Highlands specimens of fanaticism 
which Maynooth can alone equal.' If the Establishment 
was a water-bucket, the Free Church was a firebrand. 
At the same time he perceived only too well what was 
good in the host that followed Chalmers. He was in 
full sympathy with them in their devotion to the 
evangelical cause, and groaned in spirit to think of 
forces, supposed to be in the service of the one Master, 
divided and hostile, all for what he called old clothes. 
He saw the seceders popular and victorious, — theirs all 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



49 



the energy, all the faith ; while the Kirk was not only 
outwardly broken, but chill and listless within, — her 
ministers the old Erastians, or raw recruits suddenly 
promoted to posts they were unfit for and looking more 
to their stipends than their work. Among other 
instances of the prevailing torpor, he noted with 
particular dismay that the Church gave no sign when 
Peel proposed to endow Maynooth. Alone among the 
Established clergy he called a meeting and got up a 
petition against the bill. In his journal he wrote: 'I 
declare solemnly I would leave my manse and glebe 
to-morrow if I could rescind that terrible vote for 
Maynooth. I cannot find words to express my deep 
conviction of the infatuation of the step. And all 
statesmen for it ! Xot one man to form a protestant 
party, not one ! God have mercy on the country ! ' 
On the question of policy it is probable that he changed 
his mind, but there is nothing plainer to the student of 
his journals than that to the last he had for Popery, and 
for every semblance of Popery, a perfect hatred. For 
him the Establishment was nothing if not a bulwark of 
Protestantism. 4 The Church of Scotland,' he said as 
late as 1850, 'is daily going down hill.' Yet he felt 
certain that no voluntary association, for all its waving 
of banners and flourish of trumpets, was capable of 
grappling with the spiritual needs of the country. How 
was the National Church to be revived ? The aristocracy 
had but one thing in view — the landed interest ; Peel 
4 



So 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



was a trimmer ; there was nothing in mere numbers. 
What was wanted was an inner work in the hearts of 
clergy and people. ' If we were right in our souls/ he 
wrote, 1 out of this root would spring the tree and 
fruit, out of this fountain would well out the living 
water.' Two vows he took, one that he would devote 
himself to the reviving of the Church, the other that he 
would do his utmost to promote unity and peace among 
all who loved Christ. 

At Dalkeith, for the first time, he came in contact 
with the submerged ranks. These he overtook with 
the help of his congregation, which he developed into 
a society of Christian workers. He went about preach- 
ing in the wynds and closes. At various strategic points 
he opened mission stations, the walls of which he got 
hung round with placards of the Lord's Prayer and the 
Ten Commandments, and pictures from the life of 
Christ. Many had no clothes to appear in, and when 
the Duke of Buccleuch offered to pay for a missionary, 
the minister showed that money would be better spent 
in employing dressmakers and tailors. Visiting was to 
him a romantic expedition, such was the interest of his 
days among his 'brothers and sisters.' There is a 
little incident that recalls the characteristic inventions 
of his tales. 6 On coming home this evening, I saw a 
number of boys following and speaking to, and 
apparently teasing, a little boy who, with his hands in 
his pockets and all in rags, was creeping along close by 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



the wall. He seemed like a tame caged bird which had 
got loose, and was pecked at and tormented by wild 
birds. I asked the boys who he was. " Eh ! he's a 
wee boy gaun' aboot beggin', wi'out faither or mither." ' 
The minister took him to the manse, and consigned 
him to the housekeeper to get washed and dressed. By 
and by 'the door was opened, and in marched my 
poor boy, paraded in by Jessie, — a beautiful boy, clean 
as a bead, but with nothing on but a large beautiful 
clean shirt, his hair combed and divided ; and Jessie 
gazing on him with admiration, Mary Ann in the 
background. The poor boy hardly opened his lips ; he 
looked round him in bewilderment. "There he is," 
said Jessie; " I am sure ye're in anither warld the night, 
my lad. Were ye ever as clean afore ? " " No." " What 
will ye dae noo ? " "I dinna ken." " Will ye gang awa' 
and beg the night ?" "If ye like." " No," said I, " be off 
to your bed and sleep." ' 

He was led to ponder the social as well as the 
religious problem presented by life in the slums. In 
the events of the year of revolution he took a keen 
interest. ' The Chartists are put down,' he remarked 
scornfully, seeing with Carlyle that the matter would by 
no means end with the victory of the special constable. 
{ Snug the joiner,' he observed, 'is a man as other 
men are, having a body finely fashioned and tempered, 
which in rags shivers in the cold, while the "special" 
goes to his fireside, with triumph draws in his chair, 



52 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



saying, " The scoundrels are put down." We demand 
from them patience while starving — do we meet their 
demands for bread ? Special ! what hast thou done 
for thy brother ? Ay — don't stare at me or at thy 
baton — thy brother, I say ! Hast thou ever troubled 
thyself about healing his broken heart as thou hast 
about giving him a broken head ? ' He rejected the 
remedies of the politicians — reform of taxation, high 
wages, the suffrage, — holding that the only cure lay 
£ in the personal and regular communion of the better 
with the worse — man with man — until each Christian, 
like his Saviour, becomes one with those who are to be 
saved.' Such was the spirit in which he toiled among 
the poor. In the east as in the west he at once made 
a reputation. It was a common thing for divinity 
students to walk out from Edinburgh on a frosty 
Sunday to see and hear Norman Macleod. 

He was no sooner settled in Dalkeith than he began 
to take part in the reparation of the ecclesiastical 
agencies that had been ruined by the Disruption. Of 
these the chief was in his eyes the India Mission. In 
1844 he went, as one of a deputation, to the north of 
Scotland, in order to organise societies for the furtherance 
of female education in Hindostan. This was the first 
of a long series of religious embassies which compassed 
the round earth. Thirty associations were formed, but 
he returned from the tour lamenting the general apathy. 

The year following he was charged, along with his uncle 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



53 



the minister of Morven, and another, with a more 
distinguished errand. In the Colonies, wherever there 
were people connected with the Church of Scotland, the 
Secession had been felt ; shrieks of Veto, Caesar, Head- 
ship, mingled with the strokes of axes in the backwoods. 
The deputies were for British North America; their 
business was to preach, and to explain the action of the 
constitutional side in the recent conflict. To deal with 
Highland exiles who so fit as the famed Macleods of 
Morven ? And such an expedition would peculiarly 
suit Norman, involving the delight of ships and foreign 
countries, and having an object that excited his religious 
enthusiasm. 

On the outward voyage (which was from Liverpool 
in June) he found in one of the berths a dying- 
man, and conversed with him about the state of his 
soul. The invalid owned that his mother used to 
speak to him every day about these things. 'Poor 
fellow ! 1 writes Norman ; 1 perhaps it was in answer to 
her prayers that in his last hours he had beside him 
those who spoke to him the truth ' ; and 1 I am very 
thankful that I did not delay speaking to him,' was the 
minister's thought, as 1 the coffin slid down and plunged 
into the ocean.' But in Macleod the gay and the grave 
alternated in a manner that bewildered, if it did not 
shock, the pious stranger : one moment he would be in 
tears with sacred emotion, the next he was capable of 
raptures of gladness just for life's sake. Nor of his 



54 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



sincerity either way was there ever, on the part of those 
who knew him, the shadow of a doubt. In social circles, 
and particularly among fellow-voyagers, he was always 
the dominant spirit, brimming with genius and good 
humour, and so expansive and sympathetic that every 
■ one was almost immediately his friend. When the ship 
reached its destination, the passengers drank the health 
of the deputies with three times three. 

At Washington he had an interview with the President, 
Mr. Polk, — 'a plain man, of short stature, rather dark 
complexion, large forehead, and hair erect \ But what he 
was in search of was a slave-market. He was directed to 
a certain private house. ' With my own eyes/ he thought, 
' shall I now see the strange sight — a brother-man for 
sale/ Through a large gate, grated with massive iron 
bars, he was admitted to a courtyard. On one side, in 
the cellars of the owner's dwelling, was the abode of 
the men ; on the side opposite was a small barrack for 
the women. A female carrying a child at once accosted 
him, beseeching that if he bought her he would buy her 
child. 1 Five hundred dollars/ said the master, puffing 
his cigar, while an old negress cried from the outside to 
the slaves, ' Keep up your heart, keep up your heart.' 
Norman sickened at the sight. Here was slavery in its 
most mitigated form, and yet the impression made 
upon him 'by seeing instead of hearing was over- 
whelmingly bitter. Men and women,' he wrote, 1 my 
brothers and sisters, bought and sold, without crime — 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



55 



without their consent — slaves for life — slaves from child- 
hood ; — it was enough.' During the American war he 
declared that the British sympathy for the South was to 
him an inscrutable mystery. 

In the States he was not slow to pick up hints for his 
future work from Sunday School Unions and Mission 
Boards ; but that the customs of a foreign country are 
not to be inferred from a surface glance, he learned by 
an incident which he never forgot. He had mounted 
the box of a coach, and was surprised to find the driver 
seated at his left hand. ' Just as I had noted the great 
fact that " all drivers in America sit on the left side of 
the box," I thought I would ask what was gained by 
this. "Why, I guess," replied Jonathan, "I can't help it; 
Tm left-handed" ? 

In Canada he had the hardest work that had ever 
fallen to him, speaking almost every day for two or 
three hours, and that, perhaps, after a drive of thirty 
miles over the worst roads. But, perched on a 
lumber waggon, coat and waistcoat discarded, blouse 
and straw hat on, and in his mouth a good cigar, he 
was busy taking in the primeval forest — -the tufted 
heads of the trees far up in the sky, the sunshine on the 
leaves, the sudden appearance of strange fires, the 
chop - chop - chop of the pioneer's axe in the weird 
silence, and the clearance with its fine fields, cattle with 
tinkling bells, and happy children. Sometimes, joining 
a group of Highlanders, he would pretend to be an 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Englishman, and would quiz them about their savage 
language till he had roused their wrath, and then, to 
their amazement and delight, roll out Gaelic as good as 
their own. The ecclesiastical atmosphere was the same 
as in the old land. ' This angry spirit of Churchism,' he 
says, 'which has disturbed every fireside in Scotland, 
thunders at the door'of every shanty in the backwoods.' 
For himself, in explaining the Church question, he 
avoided all personalities, and gave full credit to his 
opponents, insomuch that a Free Church preacher who 
(unknown to the deputy) attended one of the meetings 
confessed that he could not find fault with one expression. 
Controversy was hardly possible when those stalwart 
scions of Fiunary met the exiles face to face; indeed, 
in most places it was more a carnival of Celtic sentiment. 
At Picton in Nova Scotia the presence of the deputies 
attracted Highlanders from all the surrounding country ; 
on a Sunday morning the bay was dotted with coming 
boats, and pedestrians, horsemen, and all sorts of 
vehicles, streamed into the town. There was a service 
in the open air. ' The tent/ writes Norman, ' was on 
a beautiful green hill, overlooking the harbour and 
neighbouring country. When I reached it I beheld 
the most touching and magnificent sight. There were 
(in addition to the crowd we had left in the church) about 
four thousand people here assembled ! John had finished 
a noble Gaelic sermon. He was standing with his head 
bare at the head of the white communion table, and was 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



57 



about to exhort the communicants. There was on 
either side space for the old elders, and a mighty mass 
of earnest listeners beyond. The exhortation ended, I 
entered the tent and looked around ; I have seen grand 
and imposing sights in my life, but this far surpassed 
them all. As I gazed on that table, along which were 
slowly passed the impressive and familiar symbols of the 
body broken and blood shed for us all in every age or 
clime — as I saw the solemn and reverent attitude of the 
communicants, every head bent down to the white 
board, and watched the expressions of the weather- 
beaten, true Highland countenances around me, and 
remembered, as I looked for a moment to the mighty 
forests which swept on to the far horizon, that all were 
in a strange land, that they had no pastors now, that 
they were as a flock in the lonely wilderness — as these 
and ten thousand other thoughts filled my heart, amidst 
the most awful silence, broken only by sobs which came 
from the Lord's Table, can you wonder that I hid my 
face, and " lifted up my voice and w r ept " ? Oh that my 
father had been with us ! what a welcome he would 
have received ! ' At various spots he met men from 
Mull and Morven, who had known his father and his 
grandfather, and near Lake Simcoe Dr. John Macleod 
found a woman who, the moment he entered her house, 
burst into tears. On her plaid she wore a brooch which 
he recognised; it had belonged to that noted domestic 
the henwife of Fiunary, and this was the henwife's 



58 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



sister. What sad and solemn partings there were with the 
exiles ! In one place two old elders put their arms about 
Norman's neck, and imprinted a farewell kiss on his 
cheek. For him, however, such scenes opened no new 
sources of emotion ; it was more that at the age of thirty- 
three he could say : i I have had peeps into real Canadian 
life : I have seen the true Indians in their encampment ; 
I have sailed far up (one hundred and fifty miles above 
Montreal) the noble Ottawa, and seen the lumber-men 
with their canoes and the North-westers on their 
way into the interior, some to cut timber, and some 
to hunt beaver for the Hudson Bay Company; I 
have been shaken to atoms over "corduroy" roads, 
and seen life in the backwoods; and I have been 
privileged to preach to immortal souls, and to 
defend my poor and calumniated Church from many 
aspersions.' 

During this visit there came to him rumours of a 
movement for a world-wide union of Protestants. His 
heart leapt up when he beheld a rainbow in the sky. 
For two years at least the Evangelical Alliance was the 
leading interest of his life. From the preliminary Con- 
ference, held at Birmingham in April 1846, he wrote to 
his sister about one of the happiest evenings he had ever 
spent on earth. * What a prayer was that of Octavius 
Winslow's ! It stirred my deepest feelings and made the 
tears pour down my cheeks.' There was developed in him 
a new love for his ministerial brethren. ' 1 felt like a 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



59 



man who had brothers, but they had been abroad, and 
he had never seen them before. 5 The Alliance was 
formed in August at the Freemasons' Hall, London, in 
an assembly composed of a thousand representative 
Christians from America and the Colonies, and from 
almost every country in Europe. The project sprang 
from a common desire on the part of certain evangelical 
men all over the globe to combine against infidelity and 
Rome. An annual week of prayer in various cities 
throughout the world, in Britain an annual conference, 
a general conference once every lustrum in some 
European capital, reports from branches on events touch- 
ing religious liberty : such were the methods by which 
these good men proposed to bring about the golden 
year. And so vigorous was the Alliance in its youth, 
that it negotiated the release of religious prisoners 
in various lands, and was the means of abolishing in 
Turkey the death-penalty for renouncing Islam. So at 
least we are told. There was doubtless at first a power- 
ful tide of Christian sentiment ; light there was little or 
none. 'When our Saviours eyes,' said the president, 
1 witnessed your entrance into this room, He witnessed a 
sight that, since the early days of Christendom, has not 
been presented to the eyes of God or man. . . . And is 
there not another class of eyes which may be said to be 
upon you ? Is not the eye of the Jew upon you ? Are 
not the eyes of the heathen upon you? They know 
not yet of your meeting : but upon the result of your 



6o 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



meeting much of their interests may be suspended. But, 
brethren, there are other eyes upon us. We have reason 
to think that no such gathering as this would take place, 
and principalities and powers and evil spirits not be 
watching for our halting; and we cannot doubt that 
they would triumph, if the spirit of love should fail, or 
the spirit of wisdom not be granted to us. And out of 
the Church angels learn lessons of wisdom (Eph. iii. 10) ; 
we cannot then doubt but that the eyes of angels are 
directed towards us.' A few days later he told the 
Conference that he had been in the committee-room, 
and ' he was persuaded he did not overstate the case when 
he said that the world's interests and the interests of 
humanity were trembling in the balance.' At a point 
in the speech of a certain professor the editor interjects, 
'The respected speaker here paused, evidently over- 
come by his feelings.' The orator 'hoped brethren 
would pardon him for so unmanly an expression of his 
feelings. He was not a man of tears on any other 
subject but that which concerned religion and its great 
interests : but from his childhood he never could refrain 
from tears, when his own personal salvation, and that 
of others, was at stake. On that subject he confessed 
he was a perfect child.' Did Norman cry, Hear, hear} 
On the contrary, he also would be greetin\ The time 
came when he not only left the Alliance, but used the 
word Evangelical as an epithet of sarcasm and reproach. 
Meanwhile, he was one of the chief figures, being a 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



61 



member of the business committee, a frequent chairman 
of devotions, and an occasional debater. What he prized 
in the meetings was the prevailing love and harmony ; 
and to sit smoking in a group of Germans, Frenchmen, 
and Americans, all united by the bond of a common 
religion, was delightful to his peculiar soul. Another 
good thing he owed to the Alliance — the privilege of 
visiting Prussian Poland and Silesia. Along with Mr. 
Herschell of London, he was sent to look into certain 
progressive movements which had been reported from 
these countries. By the year 1847 ne na( i seen the 
working of different ecclesiastical systems, from the 
borders of Russia to the Canadian backwoods, and from 
the Thames to Lochaber. The result was to deepen 
his attachment to the Church of Scotland. 

How Norman Macleod was orthodox, and yet might 
care for religion in a magnanimous way, not as an 
ecclesiastic but simply as a Christian, should now be 
plain. And in the chosen leisure of Dalkeith, inquiring 
after modern knowledge, he grew at least in mental 
susceptibility. He came under the influence of his 
heretical cousin, John Macleod Campbell, a deep and 
holy man ; and of Thomas Arnold, in certain respects a 
kindred soul; and even of Emerson, whom he hailed 
1 thou true man, poet of the backwoods.' He was 
getting on. But the advance was in spirit and feeling, 
not in religious belief. Here he was still at one with 
Macintosh, the friend of his heart. What had become 



62 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



of the scholar? In 1851 he lay at Tubingen, dying. 
After his studies at Glasgow he had gone to Cambridge, 
There he had led a painfully diligent and ascetic life. He 
had thrown in his lot with the non-intrusionists/and had 
assisted Dr. Chalmers, his idol, in the experiment at the 
West Port. At the manse of Dalkeith he had been a 
frequent visitor, but in 1848 he had proceeded to the 
Continent, never to return. His correspondence reveals 
the wonderful affection he had for his old comrade. He 
calls him his £ dearest Norman/ his 'beloved Norman,' 
whose letters are sweet to him as violets among moss ; 
speaks of his open-mindedness and loving counsel; salutes 
him as a friend to whom he owed many of the happiest 
hours of his life, much mental development, and not 
a few faithful and well-timed warnings — a friend the 
thought of whom brightened his future. 6 Think of 
you? Yes, yearn to see you, dear, dear Norman.' 
When the tidings that Macintosh was dying reached his 
friends in Scotland, Macleod immediately set out for 
Tubingen. He was detained on the Rhine for twenty- 
four hours by a thick mist, and, as it happened, it was 
two o'clock in the morning when he arrived in the town. 
He hurried to the hotel and went at once to the invalid's 
door. There he stood in breathless silence, listening to 
a hollow cough. Next day he learned from Mrs. 
Macintosh that John was sinking fast, and that -he had 
received his relatives on their arrival with a strange 
coldness, as if he hated seeing them. She durst not 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



63 



enter his room without an invitation. Pondering this 
mystery, Norman asked himself, among other questions, 
was it possible that Satan might thus tempt the saint ere 
the final victory of Christ was achieved ? He sent a note 
into the sick-room, desiring to know at what hour his 
friend would see him. The answer was, 'Come now/ 
The student, muffled in coat and plaid, was seated on a 
sofa, reading. His eyes flashed under his long black 
hair with an intense and painful lustre.' With loving 
gestures he welcomed his friend, and in a scarce audible 
voice said, 'I am holding communion with God,' and 
they were both silent. More perplexed than ever, the 
visitor went out. Not long afterwards he returned, and 
told the news from home, and recalled scenes out of the 
old days. The mystic, awakening at last to the world, 
mentioned an hour at which he would be glad 
to have another meeting. So he was brought back 
completely to his old self. He had been mentally dis- 
turbed by his mother's arrival, because, thinking that he 
might recover, he had wished to conceal his state from 
his friends. At Cannstadt, whither he was removed, he 
would sit of an evening ' with closed eyes, and head 
drooping on his breast,' listening in silence to old 
Scottish tunes — ' Wandering Willie,' ' The Flowers o' the 
Forest,' 'The Land o' the Leal'; and, again, with an air 
of absolute confidence, he would whisper his prospect of 
soon meeting Chalmers. ' My spirit,' wrote Norman, 
'felt no less than awed before him.' The com- 



6 4 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



panions took farewell of each other on the nth of 
March, and a few hours afterwards the sufferer was 
dead. 

In July Macleod was inducted to the Barony Church, 
Glasgow. A month later he was married to Catherine 
Ann Macintosh, the sister of his friend. 



CHAPTER IV 



1851-1860 

THE BARONY PARISH — MACLEOD AS PASTOR — AS PREACHER 
— HIS SYMPATHY — POSITION IN THE CITY. 

The minister of the Barony — henceforth for many 
years commonly called 1 young Norman ' to distinguish 
him from his father — was a shining exception to the 
prevailing type of the Established clergy, if not the 
rising hope of those who looked for the rebuilding of the 
National Zion. The Free Church, popular from the first, 
was going on prospering and to prosper, — her tabernacles 
set up everywhere cheek by jowl with the parish kirks. 
Now was the true gospel heard in the land. As to the 
1 bond 1 Establishment, inhabited by a godless residuum, 
seekers of the fleece, worldlings and slaves, the only 
wonder was that it kept up the pretence of being a 
Church, when it was visi ly tottering to its fall. Gradu- 
ally the religious public heard of this Norman Macleod, 
a minister of the Auld Kirk, who outdid the new 
evangelists on their own ground. In the movement for 
a world-wide federation of Protestants his enthusiasm 
5 



66 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



went far beyond theirs ; he was as much devoted as they 
were to the cause of foreign missions ; in pulpit unction 
he surpassed them : if their voices quivered, his shook ; 
if their eyelashes were wet, his cheeks streamed with 
tears. 

Than Macleod, when he left Dalkeith, no pastor was 
ever better equipped for such a charge as the Barony. 
The parish consists, along with some rural territory, of 
large districts scattered far and wide over the city, and 
contained, in 185 1, a population of 87,000, for whom, 
besides attending to his own vast congregation, the 
minister had religious ordinances to provide. Most of 
the inhabitants belonged to the working class. Now 
Macleod had persuasive eloquence and a captivating 
personality ; to make Christians of the common people, 
whom he loved for their virtues and their hardships, had 
been his 'one aim, one business, one desire/ both in 
Loudoun and Dalkeith ; and the Barony, as a sphere 
of ministerial service, presented no problem which his 
experience had not prepared him to encounter. The 
preceding incumbent, when dying, had recommended 
him as the one man fitted for the post, and the con- 
gregation, to whom 6 young Norman ' had been known 
from his Loudoun days, were eager for his appointment. 

The spirit of Macleod's ministry is partly to be traced 
to the influence of Chalmers, and, when he began his 
work in the Barony, the celebrated example of his early 
master in the neighbouring parish of St. John's must 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



67 



have been in his mind. These two pastors were equal 
in their sincerity, equal in their zeal for the evangelisa- 
tion of the masses, equal in their capacity for work. 
But whereas Chalmers surveyed the condition of the 
people like a statesman, and had his principles and 
plans of amelioration, Macleod saw mainly the individual, 
and thought most of a moral change. Of the social 
question Chalmers grasped the economic side, and, in 
relieving the poor upon a theory, the science of the 
thing had as much interest for him as the philanthropy, 
Macleod had more love of human nature, a greater 
patience with persons, a kindlier eye for the average 
man. Chalmers had more head, Macleod more heart ; 
which is not to indicate defect in either, for as Macleod 
was one of the shrewdest, so Chalmers was one of the 
tenderest of men. The minister of St. John's, with all 
his social and religious enthusiasm, hankered after 
intellectual pursuits, and was glad to escape from the 
Gallowgate of Glasgow to the academic cloisters of St. 
Andrews. Macleod, in the maturity of his powers, 
wanted a world of men. The pastorate of Chalmers, 
however, was still a vivid tradition, and could not fail to 
instruct and inspire the new minister of the Barony. 

Dwelling on the high grounds of the West End Park, 
Macleod could see from the back windows Campsie 
Fells, from the front the forest of shipping at the 
Broomielaw. His habit was to rise early, summer and 
winter; and it was always a moment of exhilaration, 



68 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



with something even of romance, when he heard the 
first blows of labour ringing in the sleeping city. i People 
talk/ he wrote, 'of early morning in the country, with 
bleating sheep, singing larks, and purling brooks. I 
prefer that roar which greets my ear when a thousand 
hammers, thundering on boilers of steam vessels which 
are to bridge the Atlantic or Pacific, usher in a new day 
— the type of a new era. I feel these are awake with 
me doing their work, and that the world is rushing on — 
to fulfil its mighty destinies, and I must do my work, 
and fulfil my grand and glorious end." And he thought, 
with mingled pity and admiration, of the workers in yard 
and factory, in forge and mine, and far away upon the 
rolling sea. Whether from unbelief or disrespectability, 
many working men shunned the churches, and looked 
askance at ' the lads in black.' Ah ! if they only knew, 
thought Norman, what peace and happiness would come 
to their homes by their acceptance of the Saviour. 
He was a sort of Walt Whitman in canonicals. But 
how was he to reach the masses scattered through his 
enormous cure ? In his hands the Barony congregation 
became what every muster of converts was in the days 
of the apostles, — a society for Christian work. Worship, 
meaning ornate services and the exaltation of the sacra- 
ments, is a mediaeval invention. Norman Macieod held 
that Christianity was instituted for the ritual of good 
actions. Indeed, for aesthetic and ceremonial (since 
there must be forms) he had too little care. Of the 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



6 9 



Barony Church a certain noble lord remarked, i I have 
seen one uglier ' ; and once Macleod had to admonish 
the congregation in these terms : 1 Scripture commands 
us to sing, not grunt ; but if you are so constituted that it 
is impossible for you to sing, but only grunt, then it is 
best to be silent/ But here were people who met to 
engage in practical beneficence, not for the luxury of 
sensuous emotion, or the hundredth hearing of a good 
advice. 1 A Christian congregation,' he says, 1 is a 
body of Christians who are associated not merely to 
receive instruction from a minister or to unite in public 
worship, but also " to consider one another and to pro- 
voke to love and good works," and as a society to do 
good to all as they have opportunity. . . . The society 
of the Christian Church, acting through its distinct or- 
ganisations or congregations like an army acting through 
its different regiments, is the grand social system which 
Christ has ordained not only for the conversion of 
sinners and the edification of saints, but also for advancing 
all that pertains to the well-being of the community.' 

Having made himself personally acquainted with his 
congregation, he organised, with the kirk session for 
the centre, an army of workers, by whom the religious, 
educational, and social needs of the parish should be 
met. The population was caught in a sort of missionary 
network. By means of meetings, for which given agents 
were responsible, the minister came in contact with his 
parishioners in every quarter. He set up numerous 



7o 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Sunday schools, and himself taught a Bible class. For 
four chapels which, on being transferred from the Free 
Church by a legal decision, had been left empty, he 
furnished both pastors and congregations. In the 
.first ten years of his ministry, from funds which he 
collected, six churches were built. He had a large staff 
of missionaries. Not content with efforts for the welfare 
of the Church within his own parish, he kept his people 
in constant touch with the foreign field, and annually 
raised from the congregation, which was one of the 
poorest in the city, large sums for the conversion of the 
heathen. Nor was this all. He provided school-build- 
ings for thousands of children ; with evening classes for 
adults, where husbands and wives were to be seen at 
their ABC. He started congregational savings banks, 
and (to keep men out of the public-house) refreshment- 
rooms attractive with books and amusements ; in which 
things, as in others more conspicuous, he was a pioneer. 

The best organisation would have been of little avail 
but for the spirit and life communicated to the workers 
by their chief. They were sustained and quickened by 
his personal influence, which was at once paternal and 
commanding, by his catching enthusiasm, by the example 
of his own intense and unsparing activity, and, above all, 
by the power of his pulpit ministrations. His church 
was crowded ; and here was no organ, no stained glass, 
no mystical ceremony. Preaching has in these days fallen 
into discredit, insomuch that it is blamed for the empti- 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



71 



ness of churches ; and the foolishness of preaching is 
obvious enough, since with some ministers Christianity 
is lost in idolatry of the Church, and some are more 
zealous for orthodoxy than for religion, and others have 
no creed at all. There would be no outcry against 
preaching if the clergy had anything to say. Half a 
century ago, before the age of evolution had set in with 
its irony and sadness, it was possible to be a great 
preacher, and yet have nothing to tell but that 6 old, old 
story ' which has reconciled millions to their lot on earth 
these eighteen hundred years. 1 There is a Father in 
Heaven who loves,' so ran Norman Macleod's con- 
fession of faith, 1 a Brother Saviour who died for us, a 
Spirit that helps us to be good, and a Home where we 
will all meet at last.' See him in the pulpit, a man of 
majestic presence, and entirely without airs and graces; 
intense in look and voice ; as natural in his utterance as 
one conversing with friends ; not an orator conscious of 
his periods and tones, but an envoy too full of thrilling 
tidings to have a thought for self. The effect was great, 
sometimes tremendous. Many a man and woman, 
reaching the open after a sermon by Norman, found 
themselves as it were in a different world, so changed 
was their moral vision. I have in my eye a certain youth 
who, one Sunday, the bells ceasing when he was in the 
High Street, and yet a long way from his usual place of 
worship, strayed into the Barony. The Doctor himself 
was in the pulpit — bearded, bronzed, and dilated to a 



72 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



giant's girth. The sermon was on God's love to man ; 
it was simple, and delivered for the most part in the 
tones of talk, yet when that accidental hearer came out 
upon the streets, the face of things wore * the light that 
.never was on sea or land,' and at his heart there was a 
vague uplifting joy. Not long afterwards, in another 
church, that youth heard Macleod again. The preacher 
had been somewhat suddenly called upon, and the 
congregation did not know, till the afternoon, that the 
evening service was to be conducted by the minister of 
the Barony. Yet the church was crowded in every part, 
even to the topmost steps of the pulpit stairs. When 
the Doctor (emerging from a door behind) faced the 
throng, it was with a roving glance, in which there was 
something of alarm. For a while he read his sermon, 
and here and there you might see some flagging of 
attention. Suddenly he raised his head, and began to 
give an illustration. From that moment onwards, for 
three-quarters of an hour, he held the vast audience 
bound as with a spell ; his utterance waxed rapid and 
passionate till it became a torrent, yet less in the manner 
of oratory than of excited conversation. There was one 
overwhelming burst about the goodness of God in build- 
ing the beautiful world for our house, its roof the starry 
infinite, its cellars stored with coal, and iron, and gold. 
Dean Stanley, a fastidious judge, declared of a sermon of 
Macleod's that ' it was all true and very moving ' — the ne 
plus ultra of praise— and that he did not know 'the man 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



73 



in the Church of England who could have preached 
such a sermon/ 'The greatest and most convincing 
preacher I ever heard/ is the confession of Sir Arthur 
Helps. According to an Indian critic, his preaching 
was 'the perfection of art without art,' 'he spoke as 
a man to men, not as a priest to beings of a lower 
order/' his effectiveness was due to 'truth and honesty, 
guided by faith and unconsciousness of self, and expressed 
in manly speech face to face/' His power in the pulpit 
seems unparalleled when to such testimonies is added the 
success and fame of his discourses to the poor. These 
were delivered in the Sunday evenings of winter. None 
but persons in working clothes were allowed to pass 
into the church. It was no uncommon thing for 
gentlemen to borrow fustian for the nonce : and they 
must present themselves with a slouch, and their hair 
pulled over their brows, lest the detective elders should 
penetrate their disguise. One such impostor had him- 
self rigged out in 'the cast-off working dress of a coach- 
builder — a dirty coat, a dirty white flannel vest, striped 
shirt, and cravat, and Glengarry bonnet.' 'I stood/ he 
says, 1 waiting among the crowd of poor men and women 
•ere shivering at the gate,, biding the time. Many of 
these women were very old and very frail . . . Poor 
souls ! they were earnestly talking about the Doctor and 
his sayings. I conversed with several working men who 
had attended all the series from the first, three or four 
years back. I asked one man if they were all Scotch 



74 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



who attended. He said, " All nations go and hear the 
Doctor." ..." A'body likes the Doctor," said another. 
One man, a labourer, I think, in a foundry, said "he 
kent great lots o' folk that's been blessed by the Doctor, 
baith Scotch and Irish. I ken an Irish Catholic that 
wrought wi' me, o' the name o' Boyd, and he came ae 
nicht out o' curiosity, and he was convertit afore he 
raise from his seat, and he's a staunch Protestant to this 
day, every bit o' him, though his father and mother, 
and a' his folks, are sair against him for't." ' None of the 
cushions or books were removed from the seats, and 
the witness says that the decorum was as good as at 
the regular service. ' In reference to the mother and 
grandmother of Timothy, the preacher made a grand 
stand for character, which made the poor man next to 
me strike the floor several times with his feet by way of 
testifying his approbation. Had the Doctor's remarks 
on the subject been delivered from a platform, they 
would have elicited thunders of applause.' If one 
realises the scene from the pews to the pulpit, one can 
understand from the following appeal to prodigal sons, 
commonplace as it is, the effect of these discourses. 
' Oh, could he only see, and had he a heart to under- 
stand, the misery which his loss has created in the 
paternal home ! He is bringing down the grey hairs 
of his father to the grave. The mother who bore him, 
and loved him ere he could know of the existence and 
unconquerable strength of her affection, has no rest day 



NORMAN .MACLEOD 



75 



or night, thinking of her absent boy, and pouring forth 
her soul in agonising prayer, as she would her lifeblood 
in death, to bring him back to her heart and home.' 

Beyond question Norman Macleod was one of the 
most sympathetic men that ever lived; nay, in his 
generation (if you will) the supreme sentimentalist of 
Christendom. He has tears for dogs and cats : of a 
horse that he rode in Palestine, one day of killing heat, 
he says, £ I wish he could have known how much I 
pitied him ' ; and of the camel, 1 The expression of his 
soft, heavy, dreamy eyes tells its own tale of meek sub- 
mission and patient endurance ever since travelling 
began in these deserts. The poor " djemel" bends his 
neck, and with a halter round his long nose and several 
hundredweight on his back paces along from the Nile to 
the Euphrates, making up his mind to any amount of 
suffering, feeling that if his wrongs could not be re- 
dressed by Abraham, he has no hope from Lord Shaftes- 
bury. 7 In the scene of man's life his spirit eagerly 
responded to every challenge. Dull he could not be, 
never recovering from the surprises of existence. So, 
with his interest in his fellow-creatures, which was both 
human and religious, he sometimes found himself in 
strange situations. Pritchard, the poisoner, he attended 
in the prison and accompanied to the scaffold. He 
would not give up the worst, and sometimes, beneath 
false notions, headlong impulses, and brutal vices, he 
discovered a heart, and, by the magic of love and insight, 



7 6 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



surprised the lurking virtue. The secret of his influence 
with the working folk was that he felt no difference from 
their social position, but spoke to them on the ground 
of common humanity, without affected familiarity or 
•priestly airs. For him class distinctions vanished in 
view of the general lot of moral beings. His experience 
was that the lower and the upper classes were very much 
alike. The poor came to him, but a lady of the Court 
could say that if she were in great trouble Dr. Norman 
Macleod was the person she would wish to go to. 1 The 
preacher, then, might see his audience in rags, and fancy 
ranks of purple, but his thought would be, ' O sickness, 
pain, and death ! what republican levellers are these of 
us all 1 ? 2 There is a zeal for the people, a worship of 
humanity in the abstract, which brings a cheap glory. 
The poet who sings of freedom, the politician with his 
bill for the establishment of universal happiness, may 
turn away in disgust from the first grimy specimen of 
the suffering race. Macleod's sympathy was for the 
individual there before him, Tom, Dick, or Harry, 
whom he claimed as a brother. He knew what touching 
affections and fidelities might lie behind the roughest 
exterior, and in the worst he still recognised a man. He 
fraternised with the sons of toil, shaking the horny fist, 
weeping on the brawny neck. In many a working man's 

1 See More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the 
Highlands, 

2 From A Peep at Russia. 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



77 



experience, it was a revelation and a turning-point, when 
the great genial Doctor, posted at the humble fireside, 
opened up the beauty of the Christian life. But often 
in the lives of the poor he found an unconscious 
splendour of virtue that pierced him to the heart. He 
saw a sister supporting, by her sole industry, an old 
father and a delicate brother, till she just lay down and 
died. One winter day he was summoned to the bedside 
of a working man who had hanged himself, but, having 
been cut down in time, was reviving; and the sinner 
had excused himself to his wife as follows : ' Dinna be 
ower sair on me. It was for you and my puir bairns I 
did it. As an able-bodied man, I could get nae relief 
from the parish, and I didna like to beg ; but I kent if 
I was deid they would be obleeged to support my widow 
and orphans.' Always, when Macleod told that story, 
he went into an ecstasy, shouting, 'That man was a 
hero!' 

Considering the moral and material plight of the 
masses, he took up, first, the question of drinking. At 
Dalkeith he had written A Plea for Temperance^ in which, 
while recommending total abstinence to all inebriates, 
and in certain cases to men of sober habits, he argued 
that there was nothing unchristian in the temperate 
use of alcoholic beverages. In Glasgow he had the 
teetotallers down on him for that ; and still more for a 
speech which he made in the General Assembly, vindicat- 
ing the working classes from the charge of drunkenness. 



78 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



The spectacle of the rich citizen, expert in vintages, 
raising his glass, 'the beaded bubbles winking at the 
brim,' and denouncing the toilers for taking their drop 
of whisky, filled him with scorn. But he warned men 
from the public-house; if they must have a dram, they 
should take it in the bosom of their family, after saying 
grace ! 

For the cure of poverty he looked to no outward 
nostrum, but to a union of ranks through the general 
development of Christian life. He was not apt to 
quarrel with existing institutions, putting his trust, like 
the mother of c wee Davie/ in 'acts out of Parliament/ 
Yet he could exclaim, 'O selfish pride! O society, 
thou tyrant ! ' and when his foot was on his native 
heath he was a regular Radical. 

' You don't mean to say that you would turn away those people ? ' 
asked Kate with astonishment. 

' What people do you mean ? ' inquired M'Dougall. 

6 1 mean such people as I have met in Glenconnan — your small 
tenants there ! ' 

4 Every man Jack of them ! A set of lazy wretches ! Why 
should I be bored and troubled with gathering rent from thirty or 
forty tenants, if I can get as much rent from one man, and perhaps 
a great deal more ? ' 

' But you will thereby lose the privilege, Captain M 'Dougall, 
the noble talent given you of making thirty or forty families happy 
instead of one. In my life I never met such people ! Yes, I will 
say such real gentlemen and ladies ; so sensible and polite ; so 
much at their ease, yet so modest; so hospitable, and yet so 
poor ! J 

' And so lazy ! 1 said Duncan ; ' whereas in the colonies, where 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



79 



I have seen them, they get on splendidly, and make first-rate 
settlers.' 

c How does it happen that their laziness vanishes then ? ' asked 
Kate. 

' Because in the colonies they can always better their condition 
by industry.' 

' But why not help them to better their condition at home ? why 
not encourage them, and give them a stimulus to labour ? ' 

1 Because, Miss Campbell, it would be a confounded bore, and 
after all it would not pay,' replied M'Dougall. . . . 

1 But surely, surely, ' she continued, ' money is not the chief end 
of man. ... I can't argue' (Kate goes on), 'but my whole soul 
tells me that this question of sacrificing everything to the god 
Money is an idolatry that must perish ; that the only way for a man 
truly to help himself is to help his brother. If I were old M 'Donald, 
I would preach a sermon against the lairds and in favour of the 
people.' 

'Might I ask your text, fair preacher?' inquired M'Dougall, 
with an admiring smile. 

'Why,' said Kate, 'the text is the only thing about it I am 
certain would be good ; and the one I would choose rings in my 
ears when I hear of the overturning of houses, the emptying of 
glens, and the banishing of families who have inhabited them for 
generations, and to whom every rock and stream is a part of their 
very selves.' 

4 But the text, the text, my lady ? ' 

'My text would be,' said Kate, ' "Is not a man better than a 
sheep?'" 1 

The descendant of the tacksman was fond of quoting 
the lines — 

'From the dim shieling on the misty island 
Mountains divide us, and a world of seas, 

But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland, 
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides.' 



1 From The Old Lieutenant and his Son. 



So 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Destitution in towns, however, seemed to involve no 
indictment of the social structure ; there was nothing for 
it but charity. As one of the administrators of the Poor 
Law, Macleod did good work, procuring the adoption of 
the boarding-out system ; but it was for those whom legal 
relief might not reach that his heart bled. ' There is 
many a desolate cry of pain/ he wrote, ' smothered within 
the walls of poor homes, like that of mariners in a sinking 
ship, who see no sail within the wide horizon. ' To aid 
the deserving poor he declared to be one of the highest 
objects that could engage the attention of good men ; — 
one of the highest, doubtless, but one of the most illusory, 
for the deserving poor you shall hardly discover, they put 
on such a prosperous face. He canvassed various plans, 
from New York to Elberfelt ; but vain was his dream of 
building a bridge between east and west by charity,— the 
wary remorse and discount of the Vandals. 

The working men of Glasgow more than once testified 
in a body to the good he had done them. Silver and 
gold they had none, they said, but they would retain 
for his kindness a lifelong gratitude. When in 1857 
his wife was lying as it were at the point of death, 
' hundreds,' he wrote, ' called to read the daily bulletin 
which I was obliged to put up. But everywhere it 
was the same. Free Church people and people of all 
Churches called. Men I never spoke to stopped me ; 
cab-drivers, 'bus-drivers, working men in the streets, 
asked after her with much feeling.' Many a time a 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



81 



surreptitious hand would be thrust into his, and in a 
moment gone. All the forenoon his house in Bath 
Street was besieged with suppliants of various kinds. 
For refuge he had a small study fitted up in the laundry, 
and there he would be sitting, pen in hand, pipe in 
mouth, now joined by a privileged visitor, now sum- 
moned to deal with a conscience or a thumb. His 
name was oftener heard in common talk than that of 
any other man, and was seldom more than 'Norman.' 
Stories about him were current in Glasgow, One day 
a U.P. minister was requested to visit a family whom 
he did not know. Thinking that they might be new 
adherents, he went to the house, which was up three 
flights of stairs. A man was lying very ill, After 
praying, the minister asked if they belonged to his 
congregation. 'Oh no,' said the wife, 'we belang to 
the Barony ; but, ye see, this is a catchin' fivver, an' it 
would never dae to risk Norman? 1 

There was always, however, a religious section not 
just very sure about Norman Macleod, he was so unlike 
a consecrated vessel, — his face never long enough, the 
whites of his eyes unseen, the whole show of him 
dashed with secularly. He was no saint in the sailor's 
definition, 'a melancholy chap who is all day long 
singing of psalms.' 2 'As for sadness and gloom,' he 

1 Other names have been associated with this anecdote, but 
Norman for my money. 

2 From The Old Lieutenant, 

6 



82 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



says somewhere, 'in accepting all things from our 
Father, I will pay no such compliment to the devil' 
How he shocked the Pharisees ! and among his chance 
hosts during lecturing tours there were simple souls 
whom his unclerical mirth bewildered. One such, a 
country provost, at whose house he had sat talking and 
telling stories till two o'clock in the morning, remarked, 
with a shake of the head, ' He's no' the man I thocht he 
was at a'.' Of his professional brethren the only type 
he could not bear was the prim priest. Once, on the 
way to a railway station, accompanied by several of the 
local presbytery, he had told a Highland story, not 
omitting the 'tamns.' They had all laughed but one, 
a celebrated prig, who had kept his mouth pursed and 
his eyes on the ground. Macleod whispered to a 

neighbour, 'Man, wouldn't it be fine to see 

drunk?' At the Burns centenary celebration in 
Glasgow he was the only minister who appeared, 
though many had been invited. He did so at the risk 
of his reputation, for religious opinion was up against 
the movement ; and, on the other hand, resolved to 
mark the evil in the poet's influence, he anticipated 
the howls of the Burns maniacs. He spoke of the noble 
protest for the independence and dignity of humanity 
expressed in the heroic song, ' A man's a man for a' that/ 
and showed what the poet's intense sentiment of nation- 
ality had done for the Scottish race ; but of the immoral 
verses, 'Would God,' he exclaimed, 'they were never 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



83 



written, never printed, and never read ! ' Macleod was 
a man of simple purity of soul. Challenged once at 
Stockholm to go to the theatre, he consented to be one 
of the party, but no sooner had the ballet begun than 
he was observed to be hanging his head, with a pained 
expression on his face. Soon he rose and went out. 
When his friends rejoined him in the hotel, and one of 
them chaffed him for leaving the performance, 'Sir,' he 
thundered, ' are you a father ? How would you like to 

see your own daughters ? ' Yet if ministers are now 

amongst the foremost in proposing the immortal memory, 
it is largely due to Xorman Macleod ; and was it not all 
in the spirit of Burns, his after activity in hacking at the 
links of our Puritan fetters ? 

' It's a queer trade our trade,' a minister's wife used 
to say, with a melancholy sigh, and she never explained. 
'Fine profession ours,' remarked a gay licentiate, 'if it 
were not for the preaching and the visiting.' Some are 
no pedestrians, but good pulpiteers, and vice versa : some 
avoid Church courts ; others glory in them. Macleod 
not only attended to all departments of a minister's 
work, but availed himself of every official privilege, if it 
implied service to the Church or the community. Early 
in his Barony period he became a distinct force in the 
General Assembly, and that in two directions, — ecclesias- 
tical liberality, and the India Mission. If the Establish- 
ment, he argued, was to have a future, it must recognise 
the tide that was surely breaking down the ecclesiastical 



8 4 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



barriers which stood in the way of the secular advance. 
Hence he advocated, to the horror of the House, the 
repeal of the theological tests for university professors. 
But it was in connection with the cause of the heathen 
that his name rose in the religious world. He preached 
every year for the London Missionary Society, and when 
he spoke in the General Assembly on the Mission 
Reports there was always a crowd. 



CHAPTER V 



EDITOR AND AUTHOR 

Pursuing his aim of putting life into the Establishment 
Macleod had, in 1849, started a little paper, the 
Edinburgh Christian Magazine, which may be described 
as a miniature plan or first sketch of Good Words. Its 
circulation did not exceed five thousand, but £ the 
blue magazine,' as it was called, was no mean agent 
in the revival of the drooping Church. While yet 
minister of Dalkeith he was frequently seen about the 
office of the publishers, Messrs. Paton & Ritchie, in 
George Street, Edinburgh ; but after his removal to 
Glasgow the editorial instructions were given in cor- 
respondence with the head printer, Mr. J. C. Erskine. 
That gentleman writes : 1 Usually he was behind time, 
and I had consequently to poke him up about the 
middle of each month. But we were always on the best 
of terms, and I always felt honoured as well as delighted 
in being associated with so lovable a man and having 
the privilege of his acquaintance.' These are some of 
the letters, in whole or part : — 

(1) Erskine, — I have worn crape for two days for you, having 
made up my mind that you were out of print, or in Death's Index 

85 



86 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Expurgatorius. What has become of you ? Well ? the concern 
must pay, but the proof-sheet must be corrected or the whole 
article cancelled, as I must not give the facts from a private letter 
in that style. Delay the publication if you like, but put it right, 
or let the concern of P. & R. perish ! 

(2) Erskine, — You know what it is to be done up in sheets, 
with a second volume in the Press. Have patience ! I bind 
myself to be ready by the 20th, though at present I am a blank 
sheet. 

(3) [September 1851.] Excellent Erskine, Prince of Printers, — 
this is to intimate my intention of being in Edinburgh on Monday, 
and visiting your den about twelve, or so, when we shall complete 
all arrangements. I think I am in excellent time, and am backing 
slowly into the old rails, when you need rail no more ! The 
matrimonial switch gives a wrong turn. The number may be easily 
discovered which marks your marriage, — it is full of blunders of 
the Press ! a perfect type of your hallucination ! — N. McL. 

(4) [Monday, 1 1 A.M., September 23, 185 1.] I shall never 
transgress more if the firm forgive me, and the demons do not seize 
me and hotpress me. As a married man, Erskine, you should 
know something of the difficulties married men have experienced, 
since the days of the Patriarch of Uz to those of Paton & Ritchie, 
from wives. I will send off more MS. by post in the afternoon, and 
I shall see you on Monday between one and two. Don't throw 
vitriol on me. Keep the printers off ! 

The next refers to the birth of his first child : 

(5) My first volume is out on Friday — bound in calf-skin, with 
cloth-guilt on the back and front, and very small type — less than a 
641x10. Author and Publisher doing well. But I do not expect 
the sale to be great for eighteen years. I hope then some great 
London firm will purchase it for a handsome sum. I cannot, 
however, complain of the delivery by the trade" as yet ! I send 
you MS. All must be printed, and some more beside. Be calm, 
Erskine. 

(6) Master Erskine ! — You should have duly informed the editor 
of the Christian Magazine that you had no sermon, seeing that a 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



87 



parson had pledged himself to send one a month ago, and I was 
under the impression that it was ' all right ' until, coming up to- 
night from the coast, I found all was wrong. I send you — 1. A 
MS. sermon — I cannot read it, but perhaps my friend the Inter- 
preter in the printing-office can ; 2. A printed sermon for a patch 
in case you are too late. If you print the MS. you must not put in 
the name — just sermon and text. I wrote it at a sitting, and it is 
imperfect — very. I leave this on Monday at 2 for the coast. 
Direct to Shandon, Helensburgh. If you have not enough, make 
up by extracts from the printed sermon. 

1 O Erskine, Erskine ! 
Had I but served my Parish as I have my Printer, 
It would not thus have left me in my misery ! ' 

The following reply was sent to an invitation to the 
editor to grace a social meeting of the workers in the 
printing-office of Messrs. Paton & Ritchie :— 

(7) [B.'s Refreshment Rooms, 10th Januaiy 1853.] My dear 
Messrs. P. & R., — I must go to Edinburgh early in February. I 
cannot afford — so hard are my Publishers — to go in January. 
Besides, feasts without alcohol are like grates without coal. The 
man who, in this weather, can be pleased with lemonade and 
become poetic on ginger-pop, is fit for murder. He is wanting in 
the essential attributes of man. He can have no stomach or nerves, 
and far less heart, while his brains must be vapid as our friend's 
Paste — he of the punch-bowl, I mean. Let Erskine by all means 
have unalcoholic swipes until his finger-ends distil foam, and his 
eyelids weep pure water. Let every teetotaller, if he pleases, sit all 
night up to his neck in a barrel of water, but do give something to 
cool the poor demons ! — Yours truly, Author of ' A Plea for Temper- 
ance.' 

The Christian Magazine gave way to Good Words, 
which was started in i860. His assumption of the 
editorship proved to be the most important circumstance 



88 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



in Macleod's career. Religious papers were the worst in 
existence, written by narrow saints, not incapable of theo- 
logical malice, and ignorant of the world and of the age. 
Good Words, while leading men * to know and to love 
God/ was to represent various schools of Christian 
thought, and make a point of human interest and scien- 
tific instruction. He had his eye on the intelligent 
mechanic, whom the evangelical prints repelled. The 
magazine was the mirror of the editor's mind, full of 
spirituality, yet taking in with relish the outer world. For 
the most part the religion was manly and bracing, but 
there was enough of another kind to suit the feebler 
souls. And in the narratives (not to say novels) many a 
maiden aunt, who thought fiction in general of the devil, 
snatched a fearful joy. Poor as the early numbers were, 
Good Words was successful from the first, reaching in 
two years a circulation of a hundred thousand. But 
the editor had to contend with virulent opposition on 
the part of the awful good. The stories were positively 
secular ! Then the association of Tulloch and Stanley, 
Kingsley and Caird, covered the whole enterprise with 
suspicion. If Macleod did not give up these dangerous 
men he was to be crushed. And what could be said 
for a paper, supposed to be fit for Sunday perusal, 
which admitted articles in astronomy? Christian 
parents should not allow their children to handle on 
the Lord's day a magazine that made so much of 
pagan luminaries like Jupiter and Mars. Private 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



89 



remonstrances poured in ; the paper was tabooed by 
religious societies; the Record, an English champion 
of the faith, kept up for months a savage attack ; 
and the General Assembly of the Free Church was 
overtured to sit upon Good Words, which it did, much 
to the increase of our circulation. The editor held 
his ground, only redoubling his anxiety to keep out 
' every expression that could pain the weakest Christian.' 
Rather than publish a novel of Anthony Trollope's, 
in which the pious characters were all made odious, 
he paid an indemnity of ^500. Art and morals 
alike may sneer, but Macleod's compromise was well 
considered and justified in the result. The storm 
blew over, and another step was gained for religious 
freedom. Good Words carried the name of Norman 
Macleod over the English-speaking world, and had a 
vogue in the remotest Hebrides. Principal Tulloch 
once met in the mountains a man who, on learning the 
traveller's name, said, i I know you from Good Words.' 
The numbers were so cherished that households gener- 
ally had them bound, and to this day the early volumes 
are held precious in many a Scottish home. The sight 
of one of the old familiar pictures still sends a thrill 
through thousands, recalling the quiet Sabbaths of their 
childhood, dear old rooms, and faces they shall see 
no more. 

Before he became the editor of Good Words, Macleod 
had published little that was of interest outside religious 



go 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



circles. The Earnest Student^ doubtless, has considerable 
merit as a biography, and is written with a tender 
grace ; but it suffers from - the inherent unfitness of 
the subject for extended treatment, — an uneventful 
life and a character wanting in colour. To say that 
it deserved a place beside the Life of M'Cheyne, to 
which it bears a resemblance, would be high praise. 
In the mass of his contributions to Good Words there 
is, of course, much that need not be criticised. The 
sermons put one in mind of the student who, being 
asked why he was not going in for the ministry, 
answered, ' I don't want to spoil my style.' His records 
of travel were eagerly read when they appeared, having 
a certain interest from the person of the adventurer, 
with humorous and graphic touches; but to give per- 
manence of charm to the account of voyages and 
journeys requires all the arts of a Kinglake or a 
Stevenson. 

Enough remains to entitle Norman Macleod to a certain 
recognition in Scottish letters. Among the ' Character 
Sketches ' there are some striking portraits— Mr. Joseph 
Walker^ for instance, the highly respectable man, who 
never drank, never cheated, never lied, and yet 4 could 
do a very sneaking, mean thing.' That is a subtle 
study, vigorously composed. As a writer of fiction it 
is remarkable that Macleod should be forgotten, when 
work similar to his, only duller, is boomed over all 
the earth. His stories, it is true, have a set religious 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



9i 



aim, but that should be no offence in days when the 
most belauded fiction is nothing if not didactic, nay, 
when the novel is made a pulpit for the promulgation 
of moral heresy. If art in fiction is to be strangled, 
religion may as well be the executioner as the last in- 
decency. The evangelical tale, no doubt, is usually in 
a sense immoral, not only taking mere church piety for 
the height of human perfection and setting up as its 
reward material success, but deliberately distorting, in 
the name of Jesus, the truth of nature and the facts of 
life. Macleod purposed to write stories which should be 
religious, and yet do no violence to reality. And his 
characters are plainly genuine, except, perhaps, the hero 
of his first attempt — The Old Lieutenant and his Son. 
Ned is to be a sailor and an exemplary Christian. Fall 
he does indeed, but not very far, and we know for sure 
that the author will set him up again at once, and higher 
than ever, on the plane of paragons. A sea-captain may 
be a good and pious man, but if, like Ned, he has chosen 
his profession at the cost of a mother's tears, driven by 
the need of adventure — 

1 God help me save I take my part 

Of danger on the roaring sea : 
A devil rises in my heart 

Far worse than any death to me ' — 

there will be in him still some nobility of irrepressible 
impulse, some leap of the spirit unawares. Macleod's 
usual method, however, is to take some unregenerate 



9 2 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



character — a wild tramp, a godless seaman, an express 
ecclesiastic — and reform him, not by religious admoni- 
tion, but by living influences that seize upon the better 
feelings. In his Vanity Fair the evangelists are the 
affections. Thus in Billy Buttons the captain and 
crew are humanised by the accident of having upon 
their hands, in the middle of the Atlantic, the care of 
a new-born infant; the father of Wee Davie is made 
another being by his wife's cry over the little coffin : — 
' O Willie, forgi'e me, for it's no' ma pairt to speak, but 
I canna help it enoo, and just, ma bonnie man, just 
agree wi ; me that we'll gi'e oor hearts noo and for ever 
to oor ain Saviour, and the Saviour o' wee Davie 
Jock Hall, the outcast in The Starling, thinking that 
he hates everybody and that everybody hates him, is 
made a new creature through the kindness and encourage- 
ment of an old soldier, who, when the bird cries, A marts 
a man for at that^ drives the lesson home, ' And ye are 
a man ; cheer up, Jock.' Macleod's good people are no 
hymn-book pietists, but, like those of Dickens, gentle 
and true. And his stories are entertaining, so that the 
most bigoted agnostic might put up with the religion 
for the sake of the amusement. 

The most prevailing quality of Macleod's fiction is the 
pathos, and though one must be a Christian to feel it all, 
there is much that no humane reader will be able to 
resist. To be sure the occasion is always simple and 
ordinary, never such, for instance, as the elaborate 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



93 



decline of a consumptive scholar in his garden-chair; 
and the cause of these tears may be only a remark or a 
gesture. Under the restrictions of Good Words he could 
not do his best as a humorist, yet he permitted himself 
to be thoroughly Scottish and provoke hearty laughter. 
Within a modest range he displays real genius in the 
portrayal of character and the rendering of Scottish 
conversation. 

The Old Lieutenant^ begun in Good Words before 
he knew it was to be a story, and continued with- 
out sight of an end, is disjointed in the narrative, 
and loaded with extraneous matter ; but the elder 
Fleming is like one of Thackeray's men, and, of the 
domestics of the good old days when the social bond 
was not cash payment but affection, where, outside of 
Scott, will you find a more delightful type than Babby ? 
When Ned was about to leave home for his first voyage, 
'no one saw the tears which filled her large eyes, or 
heard her blowing her little nose half the night.' After 
Ned's marriage, his father, inviting the young couple to 
visit the old home, says simply, 'I think that Babby 
will expect it.' Babby has a tongue in her head, and is 
never so eloquent as when she rails at the new minister. 
Under the old one she had felt many a time 1 jist mad 
at herseF that she wasna a better woman.' 4 But this 
chield Dalrymple that's cam' among us ! Hech, sirs ! 
what a round black crappit heid he has, like a bull-dog's, 
and a body round and fat like a black pudding; and the~ 



94 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



cratur gangs struttin' aboot wi' his umbrella under his 
oxter, crawin' like a midden cock, wha but him, keep us 
a' ! an' pittin' his neb into every ane's brose wi' his 
impudence. And syne he rages and rampages in the 
poopit, wi' the gowk's spittle in his mouth, flytin' on 
folk, and abusin' them for a' that's bad, till my nerves 
rise, and I could jist cry oot, if it wasna for shame, " Haud 
yer tongue, ye spitefu' cratur ! " And again, — " Eh, I 
was glad ye werena married by Dalrymple ! He routs in 
the poopit like a bull, and when the body's crackin' wi* 
ye, he cheeps, cheeps like a chirted puddock." "A 
what ? " asked Kate. " A squeezed tade ! " replied 
Babby ; " d'ye no' ken yer ain lang'age ? And as for his 
sermons, they're jist like a dog's tail, the langer the 
sma'er."' If Ned is partly made to order, the crew 
are real old salts. Their conversation finally recalls 
Flint's buccaneers, as when one (a milder Israel Hands) 
remarks, 6 But what, suppose I makes up my mind, do 
you see, to go ahead, and says, as it were, says I, I'll 
not pray, nor read the Bible, nor give up my grog, nor 
anything else, nor be a saint, but a sinner, and sail 
when I like, and where I like, and be my own captain 
—eh?' 

Macleod's best effort in fiction is The Starling, Art 
demands some abatement of the happy close ; there is 
didactic and explanatory matter that might well be 
spared ; and the episode of the quack is an astounding 
excrescence. But it is a fine and touching story, and 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



95 



shows that the author possessed the distinctive power of 
a novelist. The starling was the pet of a little boy called 
Charlie. It could say, 'I'm Charlie's bairn,' and ' A 
man's a man for a' that,' and whistle a few bars of the 
song, 1 Wha'U be king but Charlie ? ' To feed the bird 
and hear it speak and sing was the bairn's delight. He 
was the only child of his parents, a pious and happy 
couple, the wife young, the husband a retired sergeant 
of the army, back at his old trade of shoemaker. The 
boy died, and there was the bird still repeating its 
remarks and tunes, and daily becoming dearer to the 
bereaved parents for Charlie's sake. One Sunday morn- 
ing, the starling being dowie, the sergeant hung out its 
cage at the door, for the sun was shining and the air 
sweet. Immediately the bird began to pour forth its 
budget; and a crowd of children gathered about the 
cage, and the street rang with their delight. Suddenly 
appeared the minister ! at sight of whom the children 
fled, tumbling over one another and screaming in their 
fright, so that windows were thrown up, and mothers 
came flying into the rout, and there was a terrible ado. 
The Rev. Daniel Porteous, who was on his way to 
church, was scandalised at such a desecration of the 
Lord's day. But what was his horror when he found 
that the prime offender was the sergeant, one of his 
elders ? To the good couple, who looked up to Mr. 
Porteous with awe, and whose standing in the congre- 
gation was their greatest honour, the minister's anger 



9 6 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



was no light matter; the wife was in distraction, the 
husband grave and puzzled. The clerical decree was 
that the starling should be destroyed. This the sergeant, 
with all deference, refused, whereupon the minister went 
away, uttering vague threats. But as the poor wife 
seemed to think it their duty to obey, her husband 
said, 1 If you, that kens as weel as me a' the bird 
has been to us, but speak the word, the deed will be 
allowed by me.' And he took down the cage, con- 
senting that the other should put an end to the bird. 
' I'm Charlie's bairn,' exclaimed the starling. The wife 
thought that the killing should be the man's work, but 
you see that she is beginning to waver, and when her 
husband lays his hand on the bird, saying, ' Bid fareweel 
to your mistress, Charlie,' she sprang forward with a cry, 
and prevented the deed. The sergeant was suspended 
from the eldership for contumacy, and shunned in the 
village like a leper. But it all comes right in the end. 
The motive of the tale would seem to verge on the 
ludicrous ; a single false or strained note, and the whole 
thing were ruined ; yet — call it literary skill or the 
unconscious art of perfect sympathy — the treatment is 
such that there is no improbability, and for the starling — 
as one might have felt when Marie Antoinette was in the 
cart, if it were a question whether some force might 
not come dashing up a back street to the rescue, so the 
reader feels when the fate of the bird is trembling in the 
balance. The minister with his scorn of the feelings and 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



97 



worship of church principles; his sister, who is like 
himself, only adding malice \ the hypocritical elder who 
confesses, 'There's nane perfect, nane — the fac' is, I'm 
no' perfect masel"; above all, the ne'er-do-weel, Jock 
Hall, — are depicted to the life. 

That Macleod's fiction has particular merits none will 
deny, though the critic, making the most of the defects, 
might say that his stories fail as wholes. His best 
achievement is perhaps The Reminiscences of a Highland 
Parish, This, at any rate, is a book, and it justifies the 
saying in The Old Lieutenant about the Highlands : — 
4 In all this kind of scenery, along with the wild 
traditions which ghostlike float around its ancient 
keeps, and live in the tales of its inhabitants, there is a 
glory and a sadness most affecting to the imagination, and 
suggestive of a period of romance and song.' The earlier 
chapters, describing his grandfather's patriarchal home 
and the open-air education of the boys and girls of the 
manse, form a complete and charming piece — the idyll 
of Fiunary. There are exciting adventures on the misty 
hill and in the furious Sound. 

What a sight it was to see that old man, when the storm was 
fiercest, with his one eye, under its shaggy grey brow, looking to 
windward, sharp, calm, and luminous as a spark : his hand 
clutching the tiller — never speaking a word, and displeased if any 
other broke the silence, except the minister who sat beside him, 
assigning this post of honour as a great favour to Rory during the 
trying hour. That hour was generally when wind and tide met, 
and gurly grew the sea, whose green waves rose with crested heads, 
hanging against the cloud-rack, and sometimes concealing the land ; 

7 



98 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



while black sudden squalls, rushing down from the glens, struck 
the foaming billows in fury and smote the boat, threatening with 
a sharp scream to tear the tiny sail in tatters, break the mast, or 
blow out of the water the small dark speck that carried the manse 
treasures. There was one moment of peculiar difficulty and 
concentrated danger when the hand of a master was needed to 
save them. The boat has entered the worst part of the tideway. 
How ugly it looks ! Three seas higher than the rest are coming ; 
and you can see the squall blowing their white crests into smoke. 1 
In a few minutes they will be down upon the Row. ' Look out, 
Ruari ! ' whispers the minister. 1 Stand by the sheets ! ' cries Rory 
to the boys, who, seated on the ballast, gaze on him like statues, 
watching his face and eagerly listening in silence. ' Ready ! ' is 
their only reply. Down come the seas, rolling, rising, breaking ; 
falling, rising again, and looking higher and fiercer than ever. 
The tide is running like a race-horse and the gale meets it ; and 
these three seas appear now to rise like huge pyramids of green 
water, dashing their foam up into the sky. The first may be 
encountered and overcome, for the boat has good way upon her ; 
but the others will rapidly follow up the thundering charge and 
shock, and a single false movement of the helm by a hair's breadth 
will bring down a cataract like Niagara, that would shake a frigate, 
and sink the Row into the depths like a stone. The boat 
meets the first wave, and rises dry over it. ' Slack out the main- 
sheet, quick, and hold hard : there — steady ! ' commands Rory, in 
a low, firm voice, and the huge back of the second wave is seen 
breaking to leeward. ' Haul in, boys, and belay ! ' Quick as 
lightning the little craft, having again gathered way, is up in the 
teeth of the wind and soon is spinning over the third topper, not a 
drop of water having come over the lee gunwale. ' Nobly done, 
Rory ! ' exclaims the minister, as he looks back to the fierce tide- 
way which they have passed. 

But what one least forgets is the figure of the aged 
pastor taking farewell of his flock. Blind he was, and 

1 Cf. Tennyson's line, so much praised by Mr. Swinburne— 

1 And stormy crests that smoke against the sky.' 



NORMAN MACLEOD 99 

lost his bearings in the pulpit, till the beadle, old Rory, 
who had accompanied him from Skye fifty years before, 
went up and turned him round so as to face the 
congregation. 

And then stood up that venerable man, a Saul in height among 
the people, with his pure white hair falling back from his ample 
forehead over his shoulders. Few and loving and earnest were the 
words he spoke, amidst the silence of a passionately devoted 
people, which was broken only by their low sobs when he told 
them that they should see his face no more. 

All Morven is in the book, — scenery from the heather 
to the waves, life from the manse to the shieling, mixed 
with strange old legends and romantic tales. 

Was Norman Macleod a poet ? Pre-eminently so, 
said Principal Shairp, relying on Wordsworth's paradox. 
But that is a broken reed. Expression is the final cause 
of poetry, the form's the thing. Now, from Macleod 's 
habit of misquoting the finest lines it would seem that 
his love for poetry was not a poet's love. Still in his 
verse he could stumble on such rhythm as this — 

' Ah, where is he now, in what mansion, 
In what star of the infinite sky?' 

and in the conclusion of a piece about a grey-headed 
father seeing his children dance, there is a gleam of real 
poetry — 

1 But he hears a far-off music 

Guiding all the stately spheres, 
In his father-heart it echoes^ 
So he claps his hands and cheers. 5 



IOO 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



The hymn 'Courage, brothers/ has a telling ring, 
though only of rhetoric ; and in a song that had the 
honour of a place in Maga he has roughly rendered the 
spirit and atmosphere of the roaring game. But his 
cleverest achievement in rhyme is 'Captain Frazer's 
Nose/ which we are told was written during violent pain. 

Oh, if ye're at Dumbarton fair, 
Gang to the castle when ye're there. 
And see a sicht baith rich and rare — 
The nose o' Captain Frazer. 

Unless ye're blin' or unco glee't, 
A mile awa' ye're sure to see't, 
And nearer han' a man gauns wi't 
That owns the nose o' Frazer. 

It's great in length, it's great in girth, 
It's great in grief, it's great in mirth, 
Tho' grown wi' years, 'twas great at birth — 
It's greater far than Frazer ! 

I've heard volcanoes loudly roarin', 
And Niagara's waters pourin' ; 
But oh, gin ye had heard the snorin' 
Frae the nose o' Captain Frazer ! 

To wauken sleepin' congregations, 
Or rouse to battle sleepin 5 nations, 
Gae wa' wi' preachin's and orations, 
And try the nose o' Frazer ! 

Gif French invaders try to lan' 
Upon our glorious British stran', 
Fear nocht if ships are no' at han', 
But trust the nose o' Frazer. 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



IOI 



Jist crack that cannon ower the shore, 
Weel rammed wi' snuff, then let it roar 
Ae Hielan' sneeze ! then never more 
They'll daur the nose o' Frazer. 

If that great Nose is ever deid, 
To bury it ye dinna need, 
Nae coffin made o 5 wood or leed, 
Could haud the nose o' Frazer. 

But let it stan' itsel' alane, 
Erect, like some big Druid stane, 
That a' the warl' may see its bane. 
1 In memory o' Frazer ! 1 



CHAPTER VI 



BALMORAL 

If the cry for vital being — 

' 'Tis life, whereof our nerves are scant, 
More life; and fuller, that I want ' — 

ever came from Norman Macleod, it was answered 
only too well ; like a certain prayer for rain, which was 
interrupted by a ridiculous flood. Not only were his 
activities immense and various, but there was always an 
expenditure of corresponding emotion; nay, and what 
in the life of most men would have been simply an event 
was in his a crisis, what was a fleeting image with others 
was with him an indelible impression. 

He was summoned to the unique ordeal of minister- 
ing to the newly-widowed Queen. 

About twenty years before, during a visit to the West 
of Scotland, Her Majesty had for the first time attended 
a presbyterian service, on which occasion the preacher 
was Norman Macleod, the high priest of the Highlands 
and minister of St, Columba's. His son first appeared 

at Balmoral in 1854. The invitation of the minister of 

102 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



103 



Crathie he had refused (having in hand a special service 
at the Barony), but was informed that it had been sent at 
the instance of Her Majesty. He preached without any 
notes a sermon never fully written out, which he had 
delivered fifteen times. The Queen wrote in her 
Journal : 1 We went to kirk as usual at twelve o'clock. 
The service was performed by the Rev. Norman M'Leod 
of Glasgow, son of Dr. M'Leod, and anything finer I never 
heard. The sermon, entirely extempore, was quite 
admirable : so simple, and yet so eloquent, and so beauti- 
fully argued and put. The text was from the account 
of the coming of Nicodemus to Christ by night, St. 
John, chapter iii. Mr. M'Leod showed in the sermon 
how we all tried to please self, and live for that, and in 
so doing found no rest. Christ had come not only to 
die for us, but to show us how we were to live. The 
second prayer was very touching : his allusions to us 
were so simple, saying after his mention of us, "Bless 
their children." It gave me a lump in my throat, as also 
when he prayed for "the dying, the wounded, the widow, 
and the orphans." Every one came back delighted : 
and how satisfactory it is to come back from church with 
such feelings ! The servants and the Highlanders — all 
— were equally delighted.' 

In the evening he was sitting on a block of granite 
within the grounds, when he was aroused by a voice 
asking whether he was the clergyman who had preached 
that day, and found himself in the presence of the Queen 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



and the Prince Consort. This was his first meeting with 
Her Majesty, and it was only for a moment. 

On the next occasion, two years later, he dined with 
the royal family, and afterwards had some conversation 
with the Queen; referring to which he says, 1 1 never 
spoke my mind more frankly to anyone who was a 
stranger and not on an equal footing.' This he did, 
because he perceived that Her Majesty was anxious to 
go to the root and reality of things, and abhorred all 
shams. His sermons had a peculiar fascination for the 
Queen. Of the recorded estimates of Macleod's preach- 
ing, that of Victoria, if the warmest, is not the least 
discerning, and will be a telling memorial when the 
sermons are forgotten. 

The Prince Consort died at the close of the year 1861. 
In the May following, the Queen came to Balmoral. 
She sent for Norman Macleod. What a moment ! 
How was he to deal with stricken Majesty — 

' Her over all whose realms to their last isle 
The shadow of a loss drew like eclipse,, 
Darkening the world ' ? 

It was purely as a minister of religion that he had the 
honour of his sovereign's command. The truth of God, 
as he believed it, the same message which a hundred times 
he had spoken to bereaved wives in the lowliest homes, 
that, and nothing other, would he carry to the royal widow, 
whom he should regard only as 'an immortal being, a sister 
in humanity.' Their first meeting was at divine service, 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



and if the occasion was a trying one to the preacher, it 
was evidently exciting to the Queen. ' Hurried to be 
ready/ so runs the royal Journal, ' for the service which 
Dr. Macleod was kindly going to perform. And a little 
before ten, I went down with Lenchen and Affie (Alice 
being still in bed unwell) to the dining-room, in which I 
had not yet been. . . . And never was service more 
beautifully, touchingly, simply, and tenderly performed. 
. . . The sermon, entirely extempore, was admirable, all 
upon affliction, God's love, our Saviour's sufferings, 
which God would not spare Him, the blessedness of 
suffering in bringing us nearer to our eternal home, where 
we should all be together, and where our dear ones were 
gone on before us. . . . The children and I were much 
affected on coming upstairs.' After dinner he was 
summoned to the Queen's room, and there, after some 
conversation about the Prince, he told about an old 
woman in the Barony who had lost her husband and 
several of her children, and who, on being asked how 
she had been able to bear her many sorrows, replied, 
* When he was ta'en it made sic a hole in my heart that 
a' other sorrows gang lichtly through.' When Macleod 
recalled this period, he would express the whole burden 
of it in the solemn murmur, 1 That May! He has 
written : ' God enabled me to speak in public and private 
to the Queen in such a way as seemed to me to be the 
truth, the truth in God's sight — that which I believed 
she needed, though I felt it would be very trying to her 



io6 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



spirit to receive it. And what fills me with deepest 
thanksgiving is that she has received it, and written to 
me such a kind, tender letter of thanks, which shall be 
treasured in my heart while I live.' 

In the spring of the following year he was for several 
days a guest at Windsor. 1 1 walked,' he says, 4 with 
Lady Augusta to the mausoleum to meet the Queen. 
She had the key and opened it herself, undoing the 
bolts; and alone we entered, and stood in solemn 
silence beside Marochetti's beautiful statue of the 
Prince. ' 

With the royal family he was both a social favourite 
and a trusted counsellor. To Prince Alfred, who seemed 
to be particularly attached to him, he once gave this 
advice, — that * if he did God's will, good and able men 
would rally round him ; otherwise flatterers would truckle 
to him and ruin him, while caring only for themselves.' 
Both sons and daughters, when residing on the Continent, 
had flying visits from this chaplain. One Monday he 
left Glasgow for Windsor; thence, on royal errands, he 
proceeded to Bonn and Darmstadt ; he was back at 
Windsor on the Friday : and on the Sunday following, 
it may be added, he preached three times in the Barony 
Church. 

The Prince of Wales (with whom he sometimes 
stayed at Abergeldie) once put in a plea for short 
sermons. Said the Doctor, ' I am a Thomas a Becket 
and resent the interference of the State'; and sure 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



107 



enough, at the first opportunity, he preached for three- 
quarters of an hour, only so well that His Royal 
Highness wished it had been longer. To show how 
much he was thought of at Court, it may be mentioned 
that one day he was at Inverness to meet the Crown Prince 
and Princess of Prussia, the next (which was a Saturday) 
at Balmoral, and for half of the following week with 
Prince Alfred at Holyrood. But here is the crowning 
instance : 1 The Queen sat down to spin at a nice Scotch 
wheel, while I read Robert Burns to her, Tarn d Sha?iter 
and A man's a man for a? that^ her favourite.' 

Her Majesty never forgot what Dr. Macleod had been 
to her in the time of her desolation, but extended her 
confidence, nor failed to take an interest in his personal 
cares. Some of the truest and most touching words ever 
written of Norman Macleod are from the pen of Queen 
Victoria. 



CHAPTER VII 



1860-1866 

TRAVELS — BROAD CHURCH MOVEMENTS 

No minister, whose hands were full at home, ever 

travelled more or further, whether as tourist or apostle, 

than Norman Macleod. At least once a year on an 

average he spent time on the Continent. In the 

summer of i860, with a view to preach to the Scottish 

artisans residing at certain places in Northern Europe, 

he started for St. Petersburg. Elsinore, where he 

landed in honour of Hamlet, he was disappointed to 

find no c wild and stormy steep,' but a quiet little 

wooden town, full of fish and sailors. By almost 

everything in Russia he was disgusted, There for the 

first and last time in a foreign country, things failed to 

engage his interest. He visited the various churches 

of the capital, and notes St. Isaac's as ' great in granite, 

magnificent in malachite, and hoary in nothing but 

superstition.' In the Kazan he saw many flags that 

had been taken in war, and never an English one in the 

collection ! The islands of the Neva pleased him ; but 

108 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



109 



the best scene of all was where he could study Russia 
and mankind, the bazaar. Of a mammoth, the skeleton 
of which he saw in the museum, he remarks, 1 It died 
before Adam was born/ and this in Good Words, where 
there was to be nothing to pain the weakest Christian ! 
The hotels were 'filthy, the police villains, the palaces 
shams, the natives ugly,' which strain, quite exceptional 
for Macleod, was due to his hatred of the Russian 
system. At Moscow, however, he was fairly captivated 
by the Kremlin. Wherever a number of his fellow- 
countrymen could be got together he held services, 
and once a woman took his hand, saying, 1 My heart is 
full, I canna speak. 5 

His next visit abroad, two years later, was to Italy, 
and the change from St. Petersburg to Venice is 
marked in the finer tone of the record. 1 We went in 
our gondolas about nine at night beneath the bridge of 
the Rialto. . . . Palaces and churches were steeped in 
the calm brilliancy of the southern night. There was a 
silence such as could not reign in any other city on 
earth. A whisper, one's very breathing might be heard. 
Every palace was visible as in daylight, and, except for 
the forms of dark gondolas which glided past, or a few 
lights that like fireflies darted amid the darkness of the 
mysterious water-streets which opened into the Grand 
Canal, the city seemed as if dead.' 

In February 1865, accompanied by his brother 
Donald and the publisher of Good Words, Alexander 



no 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Strahan, he set out for Palestine. Soon after leaving 
Marseilles they encountered a terrific hurricane, which 
in all its fury Norman witnessed from the deck. 
Landed at Malta, he wandered about in the moonlight 
till three in the morning, and, what with forts, streets, 
palaces, batteries, bright almost as day, it was like 
a dream. From Malta onward the voyage was just 
what the traveller loved, calm and restful, far beyond 
the postman's knock, which seemed a portent created 
by fever. According to his custom when on shipboard, 
he preached in the forecastle, everything free and easy, 
the men sitting about or lying in their hammocks. 
Alexandria was a new world, the mysterious East, full 
of charm and fascination. Whether in coffee-room or 
bazaar, all was as a fancy fair got up for the amusement 
of strangers. His wonder and awe in sight of the 
Pyramids may be taken for granted. He thought to 
climb to the top, but twenty steps sufficed; he would 
not risk a vacancy in the Barony by going one yard 
further ; so there he sat, getting 6 a whiff of the inexhaust- 
ible past/ as he looked towards Ethiopia and the sources 
of the Nile. During the sail to Jaffa he sat upon 
a Moslem, taking him for the fore jib, and much he 
admired the man's patience under the pressure of the 
event. Once in Palestine, and beholding the abundance 
of the orange, what a paradise, he thought, for Sunday 
school children ! See him on the road (a horse under 
him) rejoicing that £ from felt hat downwards he has no 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



in 



trace of the ecclesiastic.' He had taken with him (instead 
of powder and shot) a musical snuff-box, and when the 
tent was pitched near a village, it was great fun to spring 
the miracle upon the crowd. Listening first with fear, 
they took courage by degrees, and ' it was truly delight- 
ful to see the revolution which those beautiful notes, as 
they sounded clear and loud through the Arab skull, 
produced upon the features of the listener. The anxious 
brow was smoothed, the black eye lighted up, the lips 
were parted in a broad smile, which revealed the ivory 
teeth, and the whole man seemed to become humanised 
as he murmured with delight, " Tayeeb, tayeeb " (good, 
good).' But his staple resource for the amusement of 
the natives was fireworks. Nothing could exeeed their 
surprise as the squib went whizzing up into the starry 
night. On the top of Neby Samwil, 1 every face was 
turned towards Jerusalem. The eye and heart caught 
it at once, as they would a parent's bier in the empty 
chamber of death. The round hill, dotted with trees, 
the dome beneath, the few minarets near it, — there were 
Olivet and Jerusalem ! No words were spoken, no 
exclamations heard; nor are any explanations needed 
to enable the reader to understand our feelings when 
seeing, for the first time, the city of the Great King.' 
Again, of his entering in, 6 1 took off my hat and blessed 
God in my heart as my horse's hoofs clattered through 
the gate.' Both within and without he went exploring, 
Bible in hand. The party saw Jordan and the Dead 



112 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Sea, from Bethlehem proceeded through Damascus to 
Samaria, and broke up at Beyrout. 

In a hotel at Athens one evening, Principal Tulloch, 
lying in bed, was startled by the bursting in of 
Norman Macleod, 'as large as life, and bluff and 
sunburnt from a tour in Syria.' To this meeting, at 
which the two leaders discussed theology and ecclesi- 
astical affairs till midnight, were doubtless due in part 
certain events which make 1865 the , most memorable 
year in the history of the Church since the Disruption. 

By this time it was evident that the Secession had in 
a manner failed. As a voluntary institution, indeed, the 
Free Church was flourishing in the eye of Europe, but it 
was not for this that the Candlishes and the Cunninghams 
had taken off their coats. The 'bond' Establishment 
was to perish, and they, on their own terms, were to get 
possession of the National Zion. Behold, the Church of 
Scotland was risen again ! For ten years its destiny had 
hung in the scales ; but in the middle of the fifties, the 
most popular preacher in Glasgow was the minister of 
the Barony, and the minister of Lady Yester's, Edinburgh, 
was the first pulpit orator in the land. Norman Macleod 
and John Caird had convinced the astonished people 
that within the old walls also the real gospel ring was to 
be heard. To these might be added one who, in a less 
conspicuous position, by the beauty of his character and 
the devotedness of his life, rendered as noble service, — 
the elder Story of Roseneath. The rising generation 



XORMAX MACLEOD 



"3 



of parish ministers could not fail to catch the new tone, 
and if they were spurred on as well by the example of their 
dissenting brethren, not a few were giving points to their 
instructors. To set the Church upon its feet, once it had 
shown signs of recovery, no one did more than Professor 
James Robertson, who was of a wonderful zeal and 
courage, strong in intellect and will, in spirit, if not 
in doctrine, liberal, — a man singularly forgotten. He 
took up the work of church extension begun by Chalmers, 
only where the master had looked to the State the pupil 
was for nothing but subscriptions. In a dozen years he 
had raised more than half a million of money, with which 
about a hundred and fifty parishes were erected. But 
nothing so much showed that the Church was alive as 
its activity in the foreign field. By the old Moderates 
(although it was a Moderate who founded the India 
Mission) the project of converting the heathen had been 
scouted as a vagary of fanaticism. That the Church 
could now bear the test of interest in dark continents 
was chiefly due to Macleod. So everywhere but in the 
Highlands the word went. — 4 There's life in the Auld 
Kirk yet' 

Religious activity was one thing; but there was a 
movement of more historic import. Evangelicalism, which 
was a reaction from the inanimate orthodoxy and the 
elegant scepticism of the eighteenth century, had revived 
religion at some expense to freedom and the rights 
of intelligence. The non-intrusionist clergy were to 
8 " 



ii4 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



Macaulay ' a sullen priesthood/ and Carlyle talked of 
c the Free Kirk and other rubbish.' Nor were the 
leaders of the Establishment more the children of light ; 
they showed perhaps a worse spirit in their resistance to 
every political measure that threatened ecclesiastical 
privilege. Zion was to be restored, and all good souls 
were putting in bricks \ but when intellect and the 
progressive spirit went into the business, there began 
developments that were not in the bargain. The modern 
note was first heard in the call for a frank recognition 
of democracy. Then an avowed reformer arose in the 
person of Robert Lee, the minister of Old Greyfriars, 
to whom, more than to any other, the form of the renais- 
sance is due. In the Ten Years' Conflict this warrior had 
taken but little interest, for on all sacerdotal claims he 
looked down with a cold contempt. A devout man he 
was at heart, and if he had a passion it was for the 
Scottish Church; but with the clerical mind he had 
absolutely nothing in common, bringing to every question 
an understanding wholly free from the prejudices of his 
order. So in the General Assembly, where for eight 
years he made a great figure, he might any day have 
said in the language of the hymn, i I'm but a stranger 
here.' A century before he would have been at home 
with the Robertsons and the Blairs. Having little humour 
or imagination, he could see nothing in his opponents 
but ignorance and bigotry. Nor would he condescend 
to any tricks of conciliation. Facts and logic he would 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



"5 



give, nothing more. A few savoury phrases, a sanctified 
outburst, an expostulation trembling on the apparent 
verge of a sob (which is the favourite device of im- 
pugned conveners) would have gone far to mollify the 
opposition ; but nothing of the kind ever came from 
the minister of Old Greyfriars. Evangelical he was not, 
and would not pretend to be ; rather he seemed to 
take a dry delight in marking the obscurantism of the 
cloth. Of missionaries he said : f They fancy there is 
no Word of God but in the Bible, and show daily that 
they have no faculty to find it even there.' For some 
reason or other he would not pray to Christ. Instead 
of the boasted Endowment Scheme he would have pre- 
ferred (thinking of the interests of learning and culture) 
a few big prizes. He spoke against ' fanaticism' 
in the approved tone of the literary Whigs ; and when 
he points out 'the intellectual errors' of the Cove- 
nanters, we seem to be listening to Mr. Buckle. In 
short, he was a superior person, meeting his oppo- 
nents with an enlightened sniff. For all that, Robert 
Lee was admirable — always just to the intellect, a 
hater of humbug in the very citadel, and the most 
dauntless heart. He served the Church of Scotland 
well. Wiser than most of those who set themselves 
to undo the effects of the Secession, he perceived that 
there was more wrong w r ith the Church than pious works 
could cure. He objected to the law of patronage, as 
inviting disputes ; he objected to the Confession of Faith 



n6 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



because, by the advance of thought and knowledge during 
two hundred years, much of it had been antiquated ; he 
objected to the church services, they were so rude and 
bare. His design was to bring about reforms in worship, 
doctrine, and government. Beginning with the first of 
these heads, he had an organ introduced into Old Grey- 
friars; he caused his congregation to kneel at prayer 
and stand to sing; and he used a liturgy. Our fore- 
fathers, it is true, wanted no such forms ; a moor, a 
hillside, was temple enough for them; and the moral 
estate summed up in the word Scotch, a significant 
word in the world these three centuries, is the monu- 
ment of these worshippers. The soul of Puritanism 
was gone, and yet the innovations raised an ecclesi- 
astical storm. That many were favourable to them was 
indeed clear from the first, and Lee had virtually 
triumphed, when a new set of leaders, mainly to stop the 
mouths of the dissenters, came to the attack, and the 
whole absurd controversy was renewed. Lee gave in 
only so far as to read his prayers from a manuscript, 
but a watch was set upon him, for he was suspected 
of heresy as well; and one day Dr. Pirie reported 
to the Assembly with horror that the minister of Old 
Greyfriars had, on the previous Sunday, delivered 'a 
terrible onslaught on effectual calling. ' But this was 
a feeble hunter when compared with Dr. Muir, who 
roundly said that the devil was at the bottom of the 
whole affair. 1 1 don't wish to be thought a terrorist. 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



ii7 



I don't pretend to be prophetic ; but it is most evident 
to me that the work that has been begun and carried on 
so far has been begun and carried on under the sinister 
influence of the great enemy of the Church — that enemy 
who has always set himself in opposition to the truth as 
it is in Jesus, and to the work of conversion — / mean 
Satan himself? Owing to an illness that befell Lee the 
case was suspended \ he died, and it was never renewed. 
The persecution of the reformer of worship is perhaps 
the meanest passage in the history of the Kirk. The 
inquisitor of old, standing for the faith of a thousand 
years, and his victim, kissing the New Testament, are 
tragic figures both ; but to read how Robert Lee was 
harassed and maligned into his grave, because he would 
not pray extempore, is like a bad novel — no dignity in 
the action, no poetic justice in the catastrophe. All 
which he contended for he won. If an Englishman 
may now witness a presbyterian service, even in the 
Highlands, without holding his sides, and in the capital 
may almost forget that he is north of the Tweed, the 
credit, such as it is, belongs to Lee. But it must not be 
supposed that in this reformation there was any aping 
of Anglicanism. Lee stood by the historic Church of 
Scotland, which he thought as good as any in Christen- 
dom. The Puseyite priests he regarded with disdain, 
dubbing them 1 poor, silly, gullible mortals.' And 
Norman Macleod, speaking as one of Lee's party, said 
explicitly, 'There never was a greater delusion than 



n8 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



to imagine that the wish to have an organ or a more 
cultivated form of worship has anything to do with 
Episcopacy.' 

Macleod had in the main supported Lee from the 
first, not that he was an enthusiast for the innovations, 
though he called them improvements; but in all such 
matters he was for ministerial freedom, and, as a general 
principle, he held that the Church should be moulded 
to meet the wants of the country. In the great debate 
of 1865 he said: 'It is on the broad ground of our 
calling as a national Church and the liberty we have as 
a national Church that I would desire to entertain with 
kindness and thoughtfulness all these questions, when 
we are asked by any portion of the people to do so.' 
The spirit of the General Assembly seemed to him a far 
greater evil than its decisions. * There is but very little 
freedom,' he sighs. 

Before the year was out, striking his own blow for 
liberty, he was to provoke such an outcry as had not 
been heard in the land since 1843. Scottish religion 
has always been of a Jewish cast. The Reformers were 
nourished on Deuteronomy, and the Covenanters, far 
from turning the other cheek also, hewed Ammon hip 
and thigh. But in our Sabbath, such as it was of old, 
and even within living memory, the best evidence that 
we are the lost ten tribes is to be found. As late 
as 1834 the General Assembly uttered this lament: 
'Multitudes, forgetful of their immortal interests, are 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



119 



accustomed to wander in the fields.' The presbytery 
of Glasgow, impelled by a public agitation against the 
running of trains on Sunday, issued a pastoral letter in 
which the sanctity of the Lord's day was based on 
the Fourth Commandment. Now this did not suit the 
views which the minister of the Barony had for years 
been putting before his congregation. He read the 
pastoral from the pulpit, as in duty bound, and then tore 
its argument to tatters. In defence of his action he 
delivered before the presbytery a speech which lasted 
for nearly four hours. No abstract could give any idea 
of this harangue, the effect of which depends on vigorous 
and racy expression. Christians had nothing to do with 
the Sabbath. What could be more absurd than to talk 
about the continued obligation of a commandment 
which no Christian kept ? But the Judaical spirit was 
preserved. On Sunday Highland ministers durst not 
shave, or they shaved on the sly. A certain deacon 
had gone to fish in the outer Hebrides. Sunday came ; 
he produced a ham, and asked that some of it should 
be cooked for breakfast. The landlord cut slices till 
he came to the bone. Further he would not go ; to 
saw on Sunday was a sin. In Glasgow we got 
parks for working men — men who rose at five in the 
morning, drudged during the day, and came home 
weary at night; and we had hitherto practically said 
to these men, in the name of the Sabbath of the 
Lord, ' Kennel up into your wretched abodes ! ' We 



120 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



must not take a cab, or have a hot joint, or let 
children amuse themselves in any way, — all because 
of the Fourth Commandment. We were told that no 
man who went in a train on Sunday could have in 
him the love of Christ. And how by such teaching 
morality was corrupted ! Some would go for a walk, 
believing it to be wrong; others would slink out by 
the back door. Yet the strictest Sabbatarians relaxed 
surprisingly when they were abroad, as if what was sinful 
in Glasgow was quite innocent in Paris. The Decalogue 
could not be identical with the moral law, for Christians 
had changed the day named in the commandment, 
whereas the moral law could not be altered even by 
God. What had we to do with a covenant made with 
Israel, a covenant involving both the past history and 
the future prospects of the Jewish nation ? The Mosaic 
economy, Decalogue and all, had been nailed to the 
cross of Christ. But who could abrogate a moral duty, 
or make right and wrong change places ? c I should 
be ashamed not to declare before the world that one 
intelligent look by faith of the holy and loving Christ 
would crush me to the dust with a sense of sin, which 
the Decalogue, heard even from Sinai, could never 
produce.' To go to the Jewish law for a rule of 
conduct was like going from the sun at noonday to 
the moon at night. Nothing could have a properly 
moral significance, if it was not contained in the law 
of life which was in Christ. 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



121 



The plea for Sunday, which forms the second part of 
his argument, is powerful in its way, but it fails to show 
that the Lord's day is a scriptural institution ; the ques- 
tion as to what is lawful or unlawful being left to 1 the 
common sense, right spirit, and manly principle of 
Christians.' 

There was an immediate hurricane over all Scotland. 
Macleod awoke one morning and found himself infamous. 
Anathemas were hurled from almost every pulpit. Every 
newspaper and many magazines took up the question. 
Scores of sermons came out, nearly all for Moses. 
There were innumerable squibs, — the cleverest in prose 
The Trial of Dr. Norman Macleod for the Murder of 
Moses 1 Law, by David Macrae, in verse the lines by 
Edmund Robertson which Dr. A. K. H. Boyd has 
brought to light, beginning — 

Have you heard of valiant Norman, 

Norman of the ample vest — 
How he fought the Ten Commandments 

In the Synod of the West ? 

Caricatures appeared in shop windows. His clerical 
brethren passed him without recognition, one of them 
with hisses. 'I felt at first,' he wrote, 'so utterly cut off 
from every Christian brother, that, had a chimney-sweep 
given me his sooty hand, and smiled on me with his 
black face, I would have welcomed his salute and blessed 
him.' With the common folk it was probably the word 
Decalogue that did all the mischief. What it was they 



122 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



did not exactly know, but it was an awful thing, the 
Decalogue, like the Equator; and 'Norman Macleod 
was for daein' awa' wi't,' as, with scared faces and bated 
breath, they told one another in the streets. Sending his 
speech to the printer — his old friend Mr. Erskine, who 
was now settled in Glasgow — he wrote- — 

My dear Erskine, — Are you mad? If you are too mad to 
know it, let one of your devils tell it to me, and I actually will 
believe the demon. I am mad, and I would like to be in the same 
cell with you. Cell ! It is all a sell together ! We are sold to 
Donkeys, and for them we write, and so must consider every 
word, as if it was a thistle for Donkeys to eat ! Do work off as 
fast as you can, or the people will believe there is no Decalogue, or 
that I am a devil— like yourself. 

Principal Tulloch pronounced the speech ' noble and 
remarkable,' but Lee (one of whose foibles it was to 
suppose himself extremely politic) called it 4 an escapade/ 
and regretted the injudicious language, the unnecessary 
shock to the pious feelings of many good people.' This 
is how he would do it : 1 The observance of the Lord's 
day rests on no authority of Scripture at all^ but the said 
observance, when it can be shown to contribute to the 
general good of the community in soul and body, has been 
sufficiently vindicated.' Lee delivered four long ser- 
mons on the Sabbath question, apparently without effect. 
With Macleod it was one big burst and done with it ; an 
escapade, if you will, but settling the business, so that 
the first day of the week has never been the same since. 
For some time it was considered probable that the valiant 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



123 



Norman would be deposed, but, after all, the presbytery 
contented itself with an admonition (which he told them 
he would show to his son as 1 an ecclesiastical fossil ') ; 
and in the General Assembly, contrary to all expectation, 
his name was never mentioned ! f Most wonderful ! 7 he 
says, c most unaccountable!' And so it was; he had not 
retracted a syllable, nay more, he had distinctly stated in 
the presbytery that he departed from the Confession of 
Faith. The Sabbath affair was a skirmish ; the battle 
was to be fought on the relation of the creed to the 
Church. 

This question was in the hands of Principal Tulloch. 
In the General Assembly of 1865, Pirie had declared that 
the Confession was 'the truth of the living God,' but 
Tulloch had said, £ With the spirit of the seventeenth 
century the Church of Scotland cannot identify itself.' 
A few months later he published an address on The 
Study of the Confession of Faith, which is a remarkable 
piece, every word weighed, and every word in its place. 
He begins by brushing aside, as utterly worthless, all such 
knowledge of the Confession as is confined to the letter, 
asserting that, to be properly understood, the Confession 
i must be studied both philosophically and historically.' 
The manifesto of a party, it reflects all the peculiarities 
which that party had gathered in the course of a struggle 
for ascendancy, insomuch that a historical student, 
well versed in the Puritan movement, could tell, by the 
internal evidence alone, the decade in which the docu- 



124 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



ment was put together, and the men who had the chief 
hand in the work. Further, many of the ideas used in 
the Confession to explain the mysteries of Christianity 
were borrowed from the philosophy of the age. The 
Confession is the embodiment of the opinions of a certain 
theological school, which was peculiarly under the 
influences and the prejudices of the period. To claim 
infallibility for such an instrument is the worst kind of 
Popery — 'that Popery which degrades the Christian 
reason while it fails to nourish the Christian imagina- 
tion.' 

Macleod cheered Tulloch on, breaking into verse — 

' Brother, up to the breach 
For Christ's freedom and truth ; 
Let us act as we teach, 
With the wisdom of age and the vigour of youth. 
Heed not their cannon-balls, 
Ask not who stands or falls ; 

Grasp the sword 

Of the Lord, 

And Forward ! ' 



CHAPTER VIII 



1867-1872 

INDIA — THE APEX — THE END 

The vision of millions upon millions in the far East 
worshipping idols had long haunted Macleod's imagina- 
tion, and, with his sense of apostleship waxing as the 
years went on, heathendom became more and more to 
him a mystery and a horror. The Asiatic was a man : 
reach his heart, it was the same as ours, and must open 
to the religion of humanity. To Macleod's stamp of 
Christian the whole idea of foreign missions was 
peculiarly congenial ; every enterprise in that field, what- 
ever Church had the credit, he hailed with enthusiasm. 
In 1858, when Angell James was appealing for a hundred 
missionaries to go to China, Macleod sent forth, in the 
Edinburgh Christian Magazine^ a voice to the British 
Churches : — 

Let us say in justice to our own deep conviction as to the 
momentous importance of this subject — to the grandeur of the cause 
which our revered father advocates — to the sense we entertain of 
the clear and imperative duty of the Church of Scotland at this 
crisis — that we bid him God-speed with all our hearts ; and express 
our firm faith that these hundred missionaries and many more will 

T2 5 



126 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



soon be in the field, with some contributed by our own Churchy to 
take part in this glorious enterprise about to open for the establish- 
ment in China, so long enslaved by Satan, of that blessed kingdom 
which is righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. 

The Church of Scotland had a footing in India, and it 
was there that his interest was fixed. There be rosy 
thousand-pounders whose eloquent wails over the dearth 
of missionaries draw handkerchiefs in the ladies' gallery, 
and if the cynic says that the command is not ' Get 
others to go ? but 6 Go ye, it is good exegesis and a 
palpable hit. But Macleod was busy among the heathen 
at home, and from 1864, when he was made convener 
of the India Mission, his mind was possessed with the 
thought of an embassy to Hindostan. The Sabbath 
question arose, and, expecting ostracism, he gave up his 
prospect ; indeed, a section of the committee, as he after- 
wards learned, moved for his resignation. The General 
Assembly, however, in 1867, upon advices from Calcutta, 
requested him to visit India. 6 How strange and sudden/ 
he wrote, 1 that I, who two years ago was threatened with 
deposition and made an offscouring by so many, am this 
year asked by the Assembly to be their representative in 
India ! ' Among his acquaintance far and near, high and 
humble, the news that Norman Macleod was going to 
India created a sensation. The Queen wrote : ' his life 
is so valuable that it is a great risk.' He received letters 
from Stanley, Helps, and Max Miiller. The presbytery 
gave him a dinner, at which the chair was taken by the 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



127 



chief Sabbatarian. Fifty private friends, including 
ministers of all denominations, entertained him at a feast. 
He in his turn held a luncheon, in the course of which he 
perambulated the tables, speaking the befitting word to 
each of thirty guests. Portraits of himself, his wife, and 
his mother, painted by Macnee, were presented to him \ 
and four hundred working men gave Mrs. Macleod 
her husband's bust in marble. There was a general 
feeling that he might never return. 1 Come life or death,' 
he said of his undertaking, ' I believe it is God's will.' 
For several weeks he had worked so hard, and gone 
through so much excitement, that when he started he 
was utterly worn out ; and throughout the tour, from 
first to last, he was afflicted with a swelling of the limbs. 

Fortunate he was in having for his fellow - deputy 
Dr. Watson, the minister of Dundee, who thought 
with him on religious matters (though pawky to 
the point of genius) and was kin to him in spirit. 
To hear these two in the parts of Highland drovers 
was, by all accounts, the greatest treat in the world. 
After a short stay in Paris, where Macleod preached, 
and got a collection for the expenses of the deputa- 
tion, on the sixth of November they embarked 
at Marseilles, having chosen the overland passage. 
Macleod was charmed with the coast scenery about 
Toulon j Corsica and Sardinia reminded him of the 
Western Highlands; but in all the Mediterranean 
there was no sight that affected him so much as the 



128 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



house of Garibaldi. At Alexandria he learned from 
his old dragoman, whom he happened to meet, that 
travellers, ever since the advice given in Eastward, 
were examining the backs of horses and mules before 
they bought them, so that Meeki, able to cheat no 
more, had taken to another trade. Thus Macleod had 
for certain done one good thing in his life. On the 
voyage down the Red Sea, having once preached for 
an hour with the thermometer at 90 , he got a warning 
of what might be in store for him in India. ' At the 
close,' says Dr. Watson, £ he was almost dead ; his face 
was flushed, his head ached, his brain was confused, 
and when he retired to his cabin the utmost efforts 
were required to restore him.' Old Indians poured 
jugs of iced water over his head. Yet, referring to the 
heat, he could write home, ' 1 just thaw on, laugh and 
joke, and feel quite happy.' One morning he got up 
at three o'clock, and in c a white Damascus camel-hair 
dressing-gown' sat on deck, sneering at the Southern 
Cross. According to his wont he was taken up with 
his fellow -passengers, among whom were soldiers who 
had fought in the Mutiny, young officers on their way 
to Magdala, civilians who had governed provinces and 
spent years among the remotest tribes, politicians, 
journalists, and adventurers. Unlike his companion, 
he had a cabin to himself, and, in the course of the 
voyage, it was more and more like a pawnbroker's 
shop. One day Watson perceived in the chaos a 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



129 



decent silk hat with its sides meeting like a trampled 
tin pan. * Man/ said Norman, by way of explanation, 
'last night I felt something very pleasant at my feet; 
I put my feet on it and rested them — I was half 
asleep. How very kind, I thought, of the steward to 
put in an extra air cushion ! and when I looked in the 
morning, it was my hat.' In the bustle of the prepara- 
tions for landing at Bombay he was heard crying, 
' Steward, did you see my red fez? ' 1 Is it a blue one? ' 
'No!' roared Norman, ''it's a red one. If you see it, 
bring it, and if any fellow won't give it up, bring his 
head along with it.' So Watson writes to Mrs. Mac- 
leod. Macleod, for his part, complaining to Mrs. 
Watson of her husband's inextinguishable laughter, 
declares, ' But for my constant gravity he would ruin the 
deputation.' He was presented with an address, signed 
by the captain, the officers, and the whole of the 
passengers, 'expressing their grateful sense of the 
peculiar privilege they had enjoyed in his society and 
his ministrations.' 

At the first sight of India, a land so full of romantic 
and mysterious interest, Macleod as a Briton, and still 
more as a Christian, was strangely moved. The working 
plan of the deputies may be stated in a dozen words : 
Bombay, Madras, Calcutta, with a loop of travel at each. 
In one city as in another Macleod had much the same 
round of triumphs and of toils. He conferred with 
missionaries of different Churches; inspected colleges 
9 



i3° 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



and schools ; and, accompanied by the highest aristo- 
cracy, both native and English, delivered sermons and 
addresses to enormous crowds. The Brahman worship 
he took pains to study, and made a point of quizzing 
the most cultured Hindoos. Socially he was treated as 
if he had been the special commissioner, not of the 
General Assembly, but of the Crown. Governors, 
military commanders, and bishops gave dinners and 
receptions in his honour. He was never well, but the 
killing fatigue at the centres was relieved by the trips to 
inland stations. From Bombay the deputies went to 
Poonah and Colgaum, whence returning they visited 
the caves of Karli. Sir Alexander Grant — afterwards 
Principal of Edinburgh University — at whose house 
Macleod met a select party of educated natives, has left 
this testimony: 'He talks to them in a large, conciliatory, 
manly way, which is a perfect model of missionary style. 
I had the most charming talks with him, lasting always 
till 2 a.m., and his mixture of poetry, thought, tenderness, 
manly sense, and humour was to me perfectly delightful. 
I had no idea his soul was so great.' At a bungalow on 
the road to Colgaum he had what he calls a dangerous 
encounter with a snake. He had wished to see a real 
cobra, and Dr. Watson reported that there was one 
outside basking in the moonshine. So off went Norman 
with his Lochaber crook. ' Slowly and cautiously I 
approached, with uplifted staff and beating heart, the 
spot where the dragon lay, and saw him, a long grey 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



131 



monster ! As the chivalrous St. George flashed upon 
my mind, I administered a fearful stroke to the brute ; 
but from a sense of duty to my wife and children rushed 
back to the bungalow in case of any putting forth of 
venom, which might cause a vacancy in the Barony, 
and resolved to delay approaching the worm till next 
morning. Now, whatever the cause was, no one, strange 
to say, could discover the dead body when morning 
dawned. A few decayed branches of a tree were alone 
discovered near his foul den, and these had unquestion- 
ably been broken by some mighty stroke \ but the cobra 
was never seen afterwards, dead or alive. . . . Why my 
friend laughed so heartily at my adventure I never 
could comprehend, and have always avoided asking 
him the question/ Their route to Madras was by sea 
to Calicut, and across country by rail from Beypore. 
In their excursions from Madras they went two 
hundred miles, as far as to Bangalore. At Calcutta, 
where they arrived about the middle of January, 
Macleod, for the first time, received the impression 
of the imperial power of the British. Thinking of 
Government House, he says : ' I have trod the gorgeous 
halls of almost every regal palace in Europe, from 
Moscow to Naples, and those of the republican White 
House at Washington, but with none of these could I 
associate such a succession of names as those of the 
men who had governed India.' He got on terms of 
friendship with the Governor-General, Lord Lawrence, 



132 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



but a State dinner, given on account of the deputies, 
he had to forego. His health was giving way, as was 
inevitable from the high pressure at which he had been 
working in a burning climate. Nevertheless he went 
about the business of the embassy. One day, when he 
had been three weeks in Calcutta, he spoke at a 
morning meeting ; held an examination in the General 
Assembly's Institution, and addressed the students in 
the great hall ; was the chief guest at a luncheon ; and 
in the evening, at the most brilliant public dinner ever 
held in the city, delivered a great speech. That night 
'the bull/ which had been 4 after him all day/ caught 
and tossed him, and there was a sudden end to his work 
in India. From a kind of noble vanity he had, Macleod 
could never bear to have the appearance of shirking a 
task. Next morning, tolerably well with his way of 
it, he telegraphed home, 'Off for the Punjaub'; but 
at a conference of doctors it was decided that 4 it 
would be attended with danger to his life should 
he persist in his intention of continuing his tour to 
Sealkote.' 

Before quitting India he took a holiday excursion. 
He had seen the Red Indians in their encampment, he 
had been on the summit of the high tower at Moscow, 
he had sat on the Mount of Olives, he had floated in a 
raft upon the Danube ; and now, behold him threading 
the lanes of holy Benares, mounted on an elephant ! 
He saw the marble glories of Mohammedan Agra, and 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



133 



examined all the famous scenes of the Mutiny, especially 
Delhi, where his heart glowed as he remembered 
Nicholson. From Delhi he returned direct to Calcutta ; 
whence, on board of an old man-of-war, in company 
with Lady Lawrence and her daughter, he sailed for 
Egypt. One little incident of the voyage is worth 
remembrance. He had been very attentive to the 
sailors, not only preaching in the forecastle on Sundays, 
but at other times reading to them selections from 
his sea stories. Now at Aden they had shipped an 
African boy who had been taken from a slaver, and 
when Macleod was about to leave the vessel, a deputation 
of the crew approached him, leading the little negro by 
the hand. 1 And now, your Reverence,' said one, 'I 
hope you won't be offended if we name this here nigger 
boy Billy Buttons? 

Cairo and the Pyramids once more; then home by 
Malta, Sicily, Naples, and Rome. 

Notwithstanding many predictions, he had come back, 
and in apparent vigour \ but his health was undermined, 
India had done for Norman. Though to a certain 
section of the clergy he was still an object of suspicion, 
his magnificent services could not be denied, and, 
besides, in the Indian undertaking — his years and his 
physique considered — there was a gallantry, a derring-do, 
that stirred men's spirits finely. So, on his first rising to 
speak in the General Assembly, after his return, he 
received an ovation. His speech, giving the results 



134 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



arrived at by the deputation, lasted for two hours, and, 
in an intellectual point of view, is perhaps the highest of 
all his works. There is a thorough grasp of the whole 
problem of the conversion of the Hindoos, with splendid 
ability in the presentation. Of the contest against the 
system of caste he says : 

I hesitate not to express the opinion that no such battle has ever 
before been given to the Church of God to fight since history began, 
and that no victory, if gained, will be followed by greater conse- 
quences. It seems to me as if the spiritual conquest of India was 
a work reserved for these latter days to accomplish, because 
requiring all the previous dear-bought experiences of the Church, 
and all the preliminary education of the world, and that, when 
accomplished, — as by the help of the living Christ it shall, — it will 
be a very Armageddon : the last great battle against every form of 
unbelief, the last fortress of the enemy stormed, the last victory 
gained as necessary to secure the unimpeded progress and the final 
triumph of the world's regeneration. 

He show T s how the evangelising methods with which 
we are familiar at home are inapplicable in India. 
' One of the noblest and most devoted of men, Mr. 
Bowen of Bombay, whom I heard thus preach, and 
who has done so for a quarter of a century, informed 
me in his own humble, truthful way,— and his case 
is not singular except for its patience and earnestness, 
— that, as far as he knew, he had never made one 
single convert/ In insisting on education as the 
first means all authorities are now at one with him ; 
but his other idea, that in India the various Christian 
sects should forget their differences, and aim at a 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



i35 



native Church, which should be independent of 
Western creeds, is still a devout imagination. 

Is the grand army to remain broken up into separate divisions, 
each to recruit to its own standard, and to invite the Hindoos to 
wear our respective uniforms, adopt our respective shibboleths, 
and learn and repeat our respective war-cries, and even make caste 
marks of our wounds and scars, which to us are but the sad 
mementoes of old battles? 1 

He foresaw a time when for idols would be sub- 
stituted Jesus, the divine yet human brother; for the 
Puranas the Bible ; for caste Christian brotherhood ; 
and for weary rite and empty ceremony the peace of 
God. 

The Moderatorship, which is the presidency of the 
General Assembly, is the highest office in the Church. 
The appointment lies with the members, but in practice 
the retiring dignitary, on the opening day, names his 
successor, who has in fact been chosen six months 
before at a secret conclave. Some such arrangement is 
necessary, as the Moderator has to wear an antique and 
elaborate scheme of apparel. Supposing the General 
Assembly were to reject the nominee, picture the 

1 Cf. Professor Max Miillei : 1 From what I know of the 
Hindoos, they seem to me riper for Christianity than any nation 
that ever accepted the gospel. It does not follow that the 
Christianity of India will be the Christianity of England ; but 
that the new religion of India will embrace all the essential 
elements of Christianity I have no doubt, and that is surely 
something worth fighting for.' (Letter to Norman Macleod in 
Memoir^ vol. ii. p. 257. 



136 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



situation ! There behind the door would be the proud 
one, giving the last touch to his ruffles, casting a final 
glance at his buckled shoes, while a gentleman in mere 
coat and trousers was marching to the Chair ! On the 
whole the college of Moderators has proved an excellent 
body of electors, and seldom has it done itself more 
credit than in promoting Norman Macleod. In 1869 he 
was, to be sure, the chief man in the Church, but the old 
Moderators were just the persons who would be most 
shocked by his view of the first day of the week. In 
offering to so recent a culprit the greatest honour which 
the Church had to bestow, they showed no little 
magnanimity, even were the idea of muzzling him not 
altogether absent. ' I should like to be at the head of 
everything/ Norman had said in his youth, and though 
too good a man to sacrifice any of his moral being to 
ambition, undoubtedly he was fond of power. The 
Moderatorship he at first, both by word and letter, 
refused, chiefly on the ground of his desire for freedom 
in the expression of his opinions. But of course it was 
all right ! 

During the session of the General Assembly the 
Moderator has an exciting round of social duties. Every 
morning he entertains a number of the clergy and their 
wives to breakfast, and at the dinners and receptions in 
Holyrood Palace he is the principal figure, next to the 
representative of the Sovereign. But the great event 
for the Moderator is the closing address, which he 



NORMAN MACLEOD 137 



delivers about midnight to a mixed crowd. After that 

comes the most impressive scene of all, when they stand 

and sing — 

' Pray that Jerusalem may have 
Peace and felicity ; 
Let them that love thee and thy peace 
Have still prosperity.' 

Speaking of the creed Macleod was so vague (mindful 
of the old hands after all) that he might as well have 
passed the matter off with one of his favourite quota- 
tions — 

1 I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me !' 

But of his oration there is one part that, were it only 
known, would grow in importance the more the cry 
for disestablishment was heard. The age, he says, is 
against, and rightly against, monopolies of every kind. 
To defend a State Church on the ground of treaties is 
idle ; the question is whether it satisfies the nation. 
Nor does he argue for the preservation of the Estab- 
lishment on any such ground as the need of a placard 
on the nation's door, Religion recognised within. 
Voluntaryism is not only insufficient to meet the spiritual 
wants of the country, but involves the dependence of the 
clergy. On the other hand, the Church exists for the 
people, and has no interests apart from theirs. When it 
ceases to have the general confidence it loses its right 
to the endowments, which are held in trust for the 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



common good. A national Chirrch should therefore be 
comprehensive, and that to the furthest limit compatible 
with its existence as a Christian institution. Every 
ecclesiastical question, whether of government, of 
worship, or even of doctrine (provided only that the 
essential faith be kept) should be decided with a single 
eye to the national interest. Were he living now, 
Macleod would probably advocate the union of the 
presbyterian Churches at any cost to the Establishment 
except the loss of the teinds. 

He was no sooner released from the General Assembly 
than he was off to Berlin, where he fixed missionaries 
for the aborigines of India. Home again, he resumed 
his peregrinations in the country, with 'a fire in his 
bones for a Mission and a Church on the point of 
perishing.' Oh it is wonderful, after his so strenuous 
day, to see the passion and hurry with which, in spite 
of the burden of the flesh, he struggles onward in 
the falling of the eve. His religious feelings and aspira- 
tions grew more and more absorbing and intense. As 
his life seemed not for long in this world, he thought 
the more of the next. Education beyond the grave, 
progress everlasting, was the favourite conception of his 
closing years. 

In 187 1, having an acute attack of gout, he was 
ordered by Sir William Jenner to take the waters at Ems. 
Towards the end of the year he owned to himself, for the 
first time, that he was unequal to his tasks. The least thing 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



139 



exhausted him, he could not sleep. Early in the follow- 
ing spring he went to St. Andrews to address the students. 
1 We were all struck/ wrote his old friend Shairp, then 
Principal of the University, 'by his worn and flaccid 
appearance. . . . After describing very clearly and 
calmly the state of the mission and its weakness for 
want of both fit men and sufficient funds, his last words 
were — " If by the time next General Assembly arrives 
neither of these are forthcoming, there is one who 
wishes he may find a grave ! " 9 A few weeks later his 
infirmities had so increased that he was compelled to 
give up the India Mission. One more effort to rouse the 
Church he was resolved to make, were it his last. When 
in the ensuing General Assembly he rose to speak, the 
House was crowded and as still as death ; it was clear to 
all that the warrior of God would soon enter into rest. 
His utterance was so rapid as to beat the reporters, but 
the speech was said to be the finest he ever made. 
The most striking passage is one rounding off his 
argument that the Westminster Confession was not for 
India : — 

'Am I to be silent lest I should be whispered about, 
or suspected, or called " dangerous," " broad," Platitudi- 
narian," " atheistic " ? So long as I have a good con- 
science towards God, and have His sun to shine on me, 
and can hear the birds singing, I can walk across the 
earth with a joyful and free heart. Let them call me 
" broad." I desire to be broad as the charity of Almighty 



140 



FAMOUS SCOTS 



God, who maketh His sun to shine on the evil and the 
good : who hateth no man, and who loveth the poorest 
Hindoo more than all their committees or all their 
Churches. But while I long for that breadth of charity 
I desire to be narrow — narrow as God's righteousness, 
which as a sharp sw r ord can separate between eternal 
right and eternal wrong.' 

On his birthday he wrote to Shairp : ' As I feel time so 
rapidly passing, I take your hand, dear old friend, with a 
firmer grip.' That day, by his express desire, his family 
were all gathered round him. As husband, father, 
brother, son, never man was more devoted. After two 
weeks of restlessness and want of sleep, suddenly the end 
came. About midday on the sixteenth of June, reclining 
on the sofa, he uttered a cry. As his wife sprang to his 
side, he sighed and passed away. 

The news that Norman Macleod was dead sent a 
thrill through the nation. His funeral was the most 
imposing ever seen in Glasgow. At the services, which 
were held in the Barony Church and in the Cathedral, 
ministers of different denominations took part. There 
were between three and four thousand in the procession, 
including magistrates, sheriffs, and professors, all in their 
official robes, and two representatives of royalty. As 
far as to the outskirts of the city the route was thronged 
with spectators. An old woman, blinking in the brilliant 



NORMAN MACLEOD 



141 



weather, was overheard saying to herself, Eh y but Pro- 
vidence has been ki?id to Norman, gi'en* him sic a 
grand day for his funeral ! He was buried beside his 
father in Campsie. There are monuments : a tablet 
at Loudoun ; a statue near the site of the old Barony 
Church ; and two stained windows at Crathie, the gift 
of Her Majesty the Queen. 



INDEX 



4 A Man's a Man for a' that ; 
Alexandria, Visit to 
Ambleside 

America, British North . 
America, Southern States 
Anglo-Catholic Movement 
Argyllshire Fencibles 
Arnold, Thomas 
Aros 

Arthur's Seat . 
Assembly, General. 



PAGE 
82, I07 

no, 128 

26 

53 
55 
34 
15 
61 
16 
45 

34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 84 



B 

Baronne, La 2 3 

Barony Church, The 64, 66, 68 

Becket, Thomas a 106 

Benares . 132 

Billy Buttons 92, 133 

Bonn 106 

Broad Church Movement 139 

Broomielaw, The 67 

Brougham, Lord 24 

Buccleuch, Duke of 50 

143 



144 INDEX 

PAGE 

Buchanan, Professor — ' Logic Bob .... 20 

Burns Centenary 82 

Burns, Robert 20, 32, 83 

C 

Caird, Principal 88, 112 

Calvinism, Scots Life based on . . .9, 29, 45 

Campbell, Macleod J 36, 61 

Campbeltown, Norman the First's Parish . . . 15, 17, 18 

Campsie, Parish of 19, 46 

Cannstadt 63 

Carlyle, Thomas 23, 5 1 

Carstairs, William 9 

Chalmers, Dr 21, 48, 62, 63, 66 

Chapel Act 42 

Character Sketches 90 

Chartism 30, 51 

Claverhouse . . . .. . . . . . 16 

Cockburn, Lord 24 

Coffee-room Reunions 33 

Columba's, St., Parish of 24 

Confession of Faith, Norman's 71 

Congregation, Type of Christian 69 

Coolins 27 

Corsica .127 

' Courage, Brothers ' 100 

' Crack about the Kirk for Kintra Folk ' 39 

Cunningham, Principal 112 

Cupar- Fife 46 

D 

Dalkeith 46, 47, 5°> 62, 66 

Darmstadt 106 



INDEX 145 

PAGE 

Darvel 29 

Dead Hand, The 33 

Death Penalty for renouncing Islam .... 59 

Decalogue, The 121 

Deputation, The Indian 127, 129 

Dickens, Charles 32 

Disestablishment 138 

Disruption, The 38, 43 

Divinity Hall, Edinburgh 21 

Glasgow 24 

Dresden 23 

Ducal Court. Weimar 22, 23 

Dunvegan Castle , . . 12 

„ Macleod's Stay at . . . 14 



E 



Earnest Student 90 

Ecclesiastical Liberality 83 

Edinburgh Christian Magazine 85 

Effectual Calling impugned 116 

Elsinore 108 

Emerson, R. W. . 61 

Erastus 41 

Erskine, J.C 85 

Evangelical Alliance, The 58, 60, 61 

Evangelical Party, The 3^? 37? 60 

F 

Family Worship in Skye 12 

Fiunary, Manse of 13 

„ Life at 14 

1 Flowers o 5 the Forest 5 63 

Free Church 43, 44, 45, 65, 89, 113, 114 

10 



146 



INDEX 



PAGE 

Freedom, Macleod's love of 118 

French Revolution 36 

G 

Garibaldi . . . ... . . . .128 

Geneva Gowns 9 

Geology, Lectures on 30 

Gilfillan, George . 20 

Glasgow, High Street 20 

„ University . . . . . . 20 

Goethe 23 

Good Words 85, 87, 88, 90 

Grant, Sir Alexander . . . . . .130 

Grunting and Singing 69 

H 

Hamlet 108 

Hastings, Dowager Marchioness of . . . . 32, 33 

Headship of Christ 35, 40 

Hebrides, the Men there 11 

Helps, Sir Arthur, on Macleod .... 73,126 

Herschell, Mr., of London 61 

High Churchism .34,42 

Highland Tacksmen . . . . . . 11 

Hildebrand . . 41 

I 

Index Expurgatorius . . . ... . 86 

India Mission, The . . . .52, 83, 126, .129, 139 

Irvine Water . . > . . . . . . . 29, 33 

Italy, Visit to . . 109 



INDEX 



147 



Jacobites 
Jaffa 

Jeffrey. Lord . 
Jerusalem, Visit to 
Johnson, Dr. Samuel 

„ Meeting with Macleod the First 

Judaical Spirit in Scotland .... 



PAGE 

34? 35 
1 10 

24 
in 
1 1 
12 
119 



Kailyard Literature 
Kazan, The 
Kingsley, Charles 
Kintyre . 
Knox, John 
Kremlin, The . 



90 
10S 
88 
16 

9> 35 
109 



Land o ; the Leal 
Lee, Rev. Dr. Robert 
Leith Pier 

Liturgy, Scots Church . 
London Missionary Society 
Lord Rector's Election . 
Lords, House of 
Loudoun, Parish of 

„ Work in . 

„ Castle 
Love, Xorman in . 



28, 2 



M 



Malta, Visit to 

Mammoth, Skeleton of ... 
Maxwell, Duke of Argyll's Chamberlain 
Maybole 



114, 115, 117 

45 
116 

84 
24 
37 
46, 66 

3o> 31 



no 
109 
16 

46 



148 INDEX 

PAGE 

Maynooth 49 

Melville, Andrew 20, 35 

Moderates, The . . . . . 36, 37, 39, 41 

Moderator of the Church 1 35, 136 

Montreal 58 

Moreby Hall, Yorkshire 22 

Morven, Parish of 13, 14, 18, 26, 57, 99 

Moscow 109 

Moslem sat upon at Jaffa . . . . . . no 

Mull, Sound of . . . 13, 57 

Miiller, Dr. Max 126 

Munich . . . 23 

M' 

M'Cheyne's Life 90 

Macintosh, John 25, 26, 61 

„ Catherine Ann 64 

Macleod, Norman, the First 12 

A Rare Figure . 13 

His Precepts 13 

Early Life 15 

Ordained to Campbeltown 15 

Communion Services 15 

His Marriage 16 

Macleod, Dr, Norman, the Hero as Priest ... 10 

Name Revered with that of Chalmers . . . 10 

His Birth 16 

Early Life 17 

Fighting the French 17 

Learns Gaelic 18 

At Campsie 19 

At College . . . . . . . . 20 

His Studies . 21 

Influence of Chalmers 21 



INDEX 



149 



Macleod, Dr. Norman — continued. page 

Death of his Brother James 22 

At Weimar 23 

Falls in Love 23 

Throws himself into Politics 24 

Speech at the Peel Banquet 25 

Tutor in his Father's House 26 

His Licence to Preach 26 

Presented to the Living of Loudoun . . . 28 

His Battles with Free-Thinking Weavers . . 30 

Lectures on Geology 30 

His Feelings towards Burns 32 

Feelings towards Ornate Ritual in Worship . . 34 
Xon-Intrusion Controversy . . . -37? 3%, 39 
Writes a Pamphlet on the Subject, " A Crack aboot 

the Kirk for Kintra Folk " .... 39 
His Speech on the Xon-Intrusion Question at 

Newmilns . . 41 

Action over the Quoad Sacras .... 42 

His Opinion of the Disruption .... 43 

Settled at Dalkeith 46 

His Feelings for the Church 49 

His Vows for its Revival 50 

Home Mission Work 50 

Incident of the Orphan Boy 51 

The India Mission 52 

Visits America 53 

Incident of the Dying Man 53 

His Sympathetic Nature 54 

Interview with President Polk .... 54 

British Sympathy with Southern States . . . 55 

Experiences in Canada 5 5-58 

Union of Protestants 58 

Evangelical Alliance 5S 

Interview with Macintosh . 62 

Marriage 64 



INDEX 



Macleod, Dr. Norman — continued. PAG e 
Minister of Barony Parish . . . . . 64 

Compared with Chalmers 67 

Early Rising and its Sights . . . . 68 

Organising Barony Congregation .... 69 
Norman's Confession of Faith . . . . 71 

His Preaching. . 72 

Preaching to the Poor 73 

Sympathy for All . 76 

Norman and Temperance . . . . 77 

Poor Law Administrator . . . . . . 79 

Plans to Aid Deserving Poor ..... 80 

His Hold on Working Men of Glasgow ... 80 

Shocking the Pharisees 81 

The Burns Centenary 82 

At the Theatre at Stockholm 83 

The Cause of the Heathen 84 

Editor and Author . . . . . . . 85 

Good Words started . . . . . . 87 

Experiences as Editor 88-90 

„ as a Writer of Fiction . .. 93 

Extracts from The Starling 96, 97 

Description of the Sound 97 

Norman a Poet 99 

Preaching at Balmoral 103 

Consolation to a Stricken Monarch . . . 104 
Intercourse with Royalty . . . . 106, 107 

Visits Russia . . . . . . . . 108 

Visit to Italy . . . . . . . . 109 

Alexandria, Malta, and the Pyramids . . .110 

Sits upon a Moslem at Jaffa no 

Delight in Palestine and Jerusalem . . . 1 1 1 
Dr. Robert Lee's System of Church Worship 115, 116 
Macleod Supports it . . . . . .117 

Outcry over Sabbath Desecration . . . .118 

Macleod inveighed against. . * . « . . . 121 



INDEX 



Macleod, Dr. Norman — continued. page 

Shunned by his Brethren 122 

The Confession of Faith Controversy . . .123 

Macleod and Tulloch 124 

Visits India 127, 128 

His Gaiety on the Voyage . . . . 128, 129 

Interest excited by his Visit 130 

His Visit cut short 132 

India had done for Norman 133 

Ovation at the General Assembly . . . .133 

Moderator 135, 136 

Gout seizes him 138 

His Last Great Speech 139 

The End at last 140 

Funeral ........ 140, 141 

Macleod, General ........ 14 

„ Dr. Donald 109 

Macleod, Laird of 12 

Macrimmon, Piping of a 14 

N 

National Church, The . . . . . . 49, 50, 65 

Neva, Islands of 108 

Newmilns 29 

Nile 1 10 

Non-Intrusion Controversy .... 34, 35, 37, 39 
'Norman' — the pet name . . . . . . 81 

O 

Old Lieutenant and his Son . . . . 79. 91, 93, 97 

Organisation in Barony Church 70 

Ottawa, The River . . . - . . . . . 58 



152 INDEX 

P 

PAGE 

Paine, Tom 30 

Palestine, Visit to . no 

Paton & Ritchie 85 

Patronage . . 35, 39 

Peel Club ......... 26 

Peel, Sir Robert 24 

Petersburg, St., Visit to 108 

Pictou, Nova Scotia 56 

Polk, President, Interview with ..... 54 

Poor, The, their Love for Macleod .... 74 

PorteouS) Rev. Daniel 95 

Preaching, his Style 72 

Preaching under Difficulties ...... 128 

' Presbyterian Puseyism 1 45 

Preston, Henry 22 

Prince Alfred 106 

Prince Consort 104 

Prince of Wales 106 

Pritchard the Poisoner 75 

Protestants, Union of 58 

Prussian Crown Prince and Princess .... 107 

Prussian Poland 61 

Puritans, The 45, 83 

Puseyism 34 

Pyramids, Visit to no 

Q 

Queen, The 103 105, 107, 126, 141 

Quoad Sacra Charges and Voting 2 

R 

Record, The 89 

Reminiscences of a Highland Parish .... 97 

Revolution, The . • 35 



INDEX 


153 




PAGE 


Rialto, The 






. . . . 48 




28 


Robespierre 


30 




6l 


S 




Sabbath Observance 


119, I20, 127 




40 




• 33, 56 


St. John's Church (Edinburgh) 


. . . . 46 




. . . . 46 


Sandford, Sir Daniel 


20 








32 




. 37, 38, 40 






Shairp, John Campbell . 


25j 26, 33, 34, 139, 140 




32 


Siberia 


61 












. • .130 




51 




. 51, 52 




. 137 




. 72, 88, 126 




24 




. 92, 94 






Strahan, Alexander, Publisher 


109 


Strathbogie Presbytery . 


38 




34 




. 50, 51 







154 



INDEX 



T 

PAGE 

Tait, Archbishop ........ 20 

Tarn d Shunter 107 

Temperance, Plea for 77 

Thackeray 93 

Theological Tests for University Professors ... 84 

Therapeutics of Religion 21 

Tolbooth Church (Edinburgh) ... .46 

Tories 24 

Tract No. 90 . . . . . . . . 34 

Tractarian Movement . . . . . . 33 

Transubstantiation 34 

Tubingen 62 

Tulloch, Principal 43, 88, 112, 122, 123 

Trollope, Anthony 89 

Tyrol 23 

U 

Universities 12, 19, 20, 21, 22, 139 

V 

Vavasour, Lady 22 

Venice, Visit to 109 

Veto Law 37, 42 

Vienna . 23 

W 

Walker, Joseph ...... .90 

Walker, Josiah .20 

i Wandering Willie 5 63 

Watson, Dr., of Dundee . . . 127 
Weavers of Loudoun . , , . , , , 30 



INDEX 155 

PAGE 

' Wee Davie 5 92 

Weimar 22, 26 

West Port and Chalmers 62 

Whigs 24 

Whitman, Walt 68 

Windsor 106 

Winslow, Octavius 58 

Wordsworth, William 21, 26, 32 

Working Men of Glasgow 80 

Y 

York Minster, Confirmation at 33 



FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 



The following Volumes are in preparation 

SIR WALTER SCOTT. By Professor Saintsbury. 
GEORGE BUCHANAN. By Robert Wallace, M.P. 
JEFFREY AND THE EDINBURGH REVIEWERS. By Sir Hugh 

GlLZEAN REID. 

ADAM SMITH. By Hector C. Macpherson. 
KIRKALDY OF GRANGE. By Louis Barbe. 
MUNGO PARK. By T. Banks Maclachlan. 
ROBERT FERGUSSON. By A. B. Grosart. 
JAMES THOMSON. By William Bayne. 
DAVID HUME. By Professor C alder wood. 
THOMAS REID. By Professor Campbell Fraser. 



OPINIONS OF THE PRESS ON THE 
" FAMOUS SCOTS" SERIES. 

Of THOMAS CARLYLE, by H. C. MACPHERSON, the 
British Weekly says : — 

"We congratulate the publishers on the in every way attractive 
appearance of the first volume of their new series. The typography 
is everything that could be wished, and the binding is most tasteful. 
. . . We heartily congratulate author and publishers on the happy 
commencement of this admirable enterprise." 

The Literary World says : — 

" One of the very best little books on Carlyle yet written, far out- 
weighing in value some more pretentious works with which we are 
familiar." 

The Scotsman says : — 

i: As an estimate of the Carlylean philosophy, and of Carlyle's place 
in literature and his influence in the domains of morals, politics, and 
social ethics, the volume reveals not only care and fairness, but insight 
and a large capacity for original thought and judgment." 

The Glasgow Daily Record says : — 

" Is distinctly creditable to the publishers, and worthy of a national 
series such as they have projected." 

The Educational News says : — 

■ l The book is written in an able, masterly, and painstaking manner." 

Of ALLAN RAMSAY, by Oliphant Smeaton, the 
Scotsman says : — 

" It is not a patchwork picture, but one in which the writer, taking 
genuine interest in his subject, and bestowing conscientious pains on 
his task, has his materials well in hand, and has used them to produce 
a portrait that is both lifelike and well balanced." 

The People's Friend says : — 

11 Presents a very interesting sketch of the life of the poet, as well as 
a well-balanced estimate and review of his works." 

The Edinburgh DispatcJi says : — 

1 The author has shown scholarship and much enthusiasm in his task." 

The Daily Record says : — 

"The kindly, vain, and pompous little wig-maker lives for us in Mr, 
Smeaton's pages.''' 

The Glasgow Herald says : — 

" A careful and intelligent study." 

Of HUGH MILLER, by W. Keith Leask, the 
Expository Times says : — 

" It is a right good book and^ a right true biography. . . . There is 
a very fine sense of Hugh Miller's greatness as a man and a Scots- 
man ; there is also a fine choice of language in making it ours." 

The Bookseller says : — 

'• Mr. Leask gives the reader a clear impression of the simplicity, and 
yet the greatness, of his hero, and the broad result of his life's work 
is very plainly and carefully set forth. A short _ appreciation of his 
scientific labours, from the competent pen of Sir Archibald Geikie, 
and a useful bibliography of his works, complete a volume which is 
well worth reading for its own sake, and which forms a worthy instal- 
ment in an admirable series." 

The Daily News says : — 

1 Leaves on us a very vivid impression." 



Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series—^/*/. 



Of JOHN KNOX, by A. Taylor Innes, Mr. Hay 
Fleming, in the Bookman, says : — 

" A masterly delineation of those stirring times in Scotland, and of 
that famous Scot who helped so much to shape them." 

The Freeman says : — 

" It is a concise, well written, and admirable narrative of the great 
Reformer's life, and in its estimate of his character and work it is 
calm, dispassionate, and well balanced. ... It is a welcome addition 
to our Knox literature." 

The Speaker says : — 

" There is vision in this book, as well as knowledge." 

The Sunday School Chronicle says : — 

" Everybody who is acquainted with Mr. Taylor Innes's^ exquisite 
lecture on Samuel Rutherford will feel instinctively that he is just the 
man to do justice to the great Reformer, who is more to Scotland 
' than any million of unblameable Scotsmen who need no forgiveness.' 
His literary skill, his thorough acquaintance with Scottish ecclesiasti- 
cal life, his religious insight, his chastened enthusiasm, have enabled 
the author to produce an excellent piece of work. ... It is a noble 
and inspiring theme, and Mr. Taylor Innes has handled it to per- 
fection." 

Of ROBERT BURNS, by Gabriel Setoun, the 
New Age says : — 

" It is the best thing on Burns we have yet had, almost as good as 
Carlyle's Essay and the pamphlet published by Dr. Nichol of 
Glasgow." 

The Methodist Times says : — 

" We are inclined to regard it as the very best that has yet been pro- 
duced. There is a proper perspective, and Mr. Setoun does neither 
praise nor blame too copiously. . . . A difficult bit of work has been 
well done, and with fine literary and ethical discrimination." 

Youth says : — 

"It is written with knowledge, judgment, and^ skill. . . . The 
, author's estimate of the moral character of Burns is temperate and 
discriminating ; he sees and states his evil qualities, and beside these 
he places his good ones in their fulness, depth, and splendour. The 
exposition of the special features marking the genius of the poet is 
able and penetrating. 

Of THE BALLAD ISTS, by John Geddie, the 

Birmingham Daily Gazette says : — 

"As a popular sketch of an intensely popular theme, Mr. Geddie's 
contribution to the 1 Famous Scots Series ' is most excellent." 

The Publishers' Circular says : — 

" It may be predicted that lovers of romantic literature will re-peruse 
the old ballads with a quickened zest after reading Mr. Geddie's book. 
We have not had a more welcome little volume for many a day." 

The New Age says :— 

" One of the most delightful and eloquent appreciations of the ballad 
literature of Scotland that has ever seen the light." 

The Spectator says :— 

"The author has certainly made a contribution of remarkable value 
to the literary history of Scotland. We do not know of a book in 
which the subject has been treated with deeper sympathy or out of a 
fuller knowledge." 



Press Opinions on "Famous Scots" Series—^;*/. 



Of RICHARD CAMERON, by Professor Herkless, 
The Freeman says : — 

"Professor Herkless has made us all his debtors by his thorough- 
going and unwearied research, by his collecting materials from out-of- 
the-way quarters, and making much that was previously vague and 
shadowy clear and distinct." 

The Christian News says : — 

"This volume is ably written, is full of interest and instruction, and 
enables the reader to form a conception of the man who in his day and 
generation gave his life for Christ's cause and kingdom." 

The Dundee Courier says : — 

" In selecting Professor Herkless to prepare this addition to the 
1 Famous Scots Series ' of books, the publishers have made an excellent 
choice. The vigorous, manly style adopted is exactly suited to the 
subject, and Richard Cameron is presented to the reader in a manner 
as interesting as it is impressive. . . . Professor Herkless has done 
remarkably well, and the portrait he has so cleverly delineated of one 
of Scotland's most cherished heroes is one that will never fade." 

Of SIR JAMES YOUNG SIMPSON, by Eve 
Blantyre Simpson, the Speaker says : — 

" This little book is full of insight and knowledge, and by many 
picturesque incidents and pithy sayings it helps us to understand in a 
vivid and intimate sense the high qualities and golden deeds which 
rendered Sir James Simpson's strenuous life impressive and 
memorable." 

The Daily Chronicle says : — 

"It is indeed long since we have read such a charmingly-written 
biography as this little Life of the most typical and 1 Famous Scot/ that 
his countrymen have been proud of since the time of Sir Walter. . . ; 
There is not a dull, irrelevant, or superfluous page in all Miss Simpson's 
booklet, and she has performed the biographer's chief duty — that of 
selection— with consummate skill and judgment." 

The Leeds Mercury says : — 

"The narrative throughout is well balanced, and the biographer has 
been wisely advised in giving prominence to her father's great achieve- 
ment — the introduction of chloroform — and what led to it." 

Of THOMAS CHALMERS, by W. Garden Blaikie, 
the Spectator says : — 

" The most notable feature of Professor Blaikie's book — and none 
could be more commendable — is its perfect balance and proportion. 
In other words, justice is done equally to the private and to the public 
life of Chalmers, if possible greater justice than has been done by 
Mrs. Oliphant. 

The Scottish Congregationalist says : — 

"No one can read the admirable and vivid sketch of his life which 
Dr. Blaikie has written without feeling admiration for the man, and 
gaining inspiration from his example." 

Of JAMES BOSWELL, by W. Keith Leask, the 
Spectator says : — 

"This is one of the best volumes of the excellent 'Famous Scots 
Series,' and one of the fairest and most discriminating biographies of 
Boswell that have ever appeared." 

The Dundee Advertiser says : — 

" It is the admirable manner in which the very complexity of the man 
is indicated that makes W. Keith Leask's biography of him one of 
peculiar merit and interest. . . . It is not only a life of Boswell, but 
a picture of his time— vivid, faithful, impressive." 



Press Opinions on "Famous Scots 55 Series—^/. 



The Morning Leader says : — 

' ' Mr. W. K. Leask has approached the biographer of Johnson in the 
only possible way by which a really interesting book could have been 
arrived at — by way of the open mind. . . . The defence of Bosweli in 
the concluding chapter of his delightful study is one of the finest and 
most convincing passages that have recently appeared in the field of 
British biography." 

Of TOBIAS SMOLLETT, by Oliphant Smeaton, 
the Dundee Cotirier says : — 

" It is impossible to read the pages of this little work without being 
struck not only by its historical value, but by the fairness of its 
criticism." 

The Weekly Scotsman says : — 

" The book is written in a crisp and lively style. . . . The picture of 
the great novelist is complete and lifelike. Not only does Mr. 
Smeaton give a scholarly sketch and estimate of Smollett's literary 
career, he constantly keeps the reader in conscious touch and 
sympathy with his personality, and produces a portrait of the man as 
a man which is not likely to be readily forgotten." 

The Newsagent and Booksellers' Review says : — 

"Tobias Smollett was versatile enough to deserve a distinguished 
place in any gallery of gifted Scots, such as the one to which Mr. 
Smeaton has contributed this clever and lifelike portrait." 

Of FLETCHER OF SALTOUN, by W. G. T. Omond, 
the Edinburgh Evening News says : — 

" The writer has given us in brief compass the pith of what is known 
about an able and patriotic if somewhat dogmatic and impracticable 
Scotsman who lived in stormy times. . . . Mr. Omond describes, in a 
clear, terse, vigorous way, the constitution of the Old Scots Parlia- 
ment, and the part taken by Fletcher as a public man in the stormy 
debates that took place prior to the union of the Parliaments in 1707. 
This part of the book gives an admirable summary of the state of 
Scottish politics and of the national feeling at an important period." 

The Leeds Mercury says : — 

"Unmistakably the most interesting and complete story of the life of 
Fletcher of Saltoun that has yet appeared. Mr. Omond has had 
many facilities placed at his disposal, and of these he has made 
excellent use." 

The Speaker says : — 

" Mr. Omond has told the story of Fletcher of Saltoun in this mono- 
graph with ability and judgment." 

Of THE BLACKWOOD GROUP, by Sir GEORGE 
Douglas, the Scotsman says : — 

"In brief compass, Sir George Douglas gives us skilfully blended 
together much pleasantly written biography and just and judicious 
criticism." 

The Weekly Citizen says : — 

"It need not be said that to everyone interested in the literature of 
the first half of the century, and especially to every Scotsman^ so 
interested, 'The Blackwood Group' is a phrase abounding in promise. 
And really Sir George Douglas fulfils the promise he tacitly makes in 
his title. He is intimately acquainted not only with the books of the 
different members of the 'group,' but also with their environment, 
social and otherwise. Besides, he writes with sympathy as well as 
knowledge." 



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